Book Review: The Truth about Freud's Technique: The Encounter with the Real

*The Truth about Freud's Technique. The Encounter with the Real by M. Guy Thompson. New York: New York University Press. 1994 289 pp.

M. Guy Thompson is an American psychologist who received his analytic training at the Philadelphia Association in London and whose central concern is the integration of phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Your final assessment of his writings will depend on whether you believe that such an integration is possible.

About ten years ago, the author wrote "The Death of Desire" which defines "desire" - with Hegel - "in terms of the subject's existential appeal for recognition, in terms of the lack at the heart of man's being". Desire is no longer, as in Freud, a biologically rooted need but the experience of the lack of affirmation, of estrangement. It is a mistaken kind of therapy that tries to extinguish this desire, to "kill" it rather than to help the client to see it and accept it as part of the human condition. (This view is, of course, based on the ideas of Jacques Lacan.)

It is easy to see the existential-phenomenological relevance of the experience of an emptiness crying out to be filled, the experience of the desire to be desired by the other. But Guy Thompson tells us also that this experience goes back to the loss of mother's breast, a "lost object" that cannot be restored. And at this point, a gap appears to me between the experience of an aspect of existence as such, and an explanatory hypothesis which is inexperienced. It reaffirms my suspicion that phenomenology and psychoanalysis cannot be integrated.

This problem also arises in the book under review. This book has a more fundamental theme: it tries to show that Freud's technique was basically "existential". As so often when writers use this word Guy Thompson does not tell us what he really means by it. As so often the word indicates more clearly what it does not mean - Freud's "technique" was not what his successor expected psychoanalytic technique to be: controlled, impersonal, bound by rules. Freud was not a "Freudian" as the famous joke points out.

Guy Thompson does not tire of distinguishing Freud's clinical approach from that of contemporary psychoanalytic schools. Freud was intensity involved with his patients. He did not believe in seeing his patients for longer than a year. He did not believe in the therapeutic usefulness of regression. He was not concerned with countertransference. And above all: his technical papers were "recommendations" (Ratschläge), not "rules".

In pointing this out, Guy Thompson does an important service to Freud. He also shows up the dehumanization of psychoanalytic practice. But does he show Freud to be a phenomenologist or existentialist? Guy Thompson stresses that Freud saw the denial of reality as the core of neurosis. The task of psychoanalysis then becomes the attempt to help the patient towards an acceptance of reality. And in Guy Thompson's view Freud equates reality with truth, psychoanalysis is concerned with the uncovering of truth, with unconcealment - like Heidegger.

"Unconcealment" is the literal translation of the Greek word for truth (aletheia), and Heidegger was indeed concerned with it. What human beings "conceal", in Heidegger's view, is "Being", not just reality (which can be defined in many ways) but the inexorable aspects of existence itself. The reader of Guy Thompson's argument will have to decide whether the repression of unacceptable impulses and the flight from "Being" are both "un-truth" in the same way. I remain unconvinced.

Once again an incompatibility between a psychoanalytic and a phenomenological approach seem to me to make itself felt. Freud's assumption that unacceptable impulses are repressed into a special psychic area called "The Unconscious" from which they can be helped to emerge is an explanation which may be right or wrong but is not as such experienceable. But when we talk of the denial of aspects of existence, of turning our back, for instance, on mortality or the inevitable insecurity of life or the unavoidable presence of other people, we remain within the area of immediate experience. We are talking about what is and how we respond to it. This does not mean that we are always aware of our response, but awareness and unawareness lie on an experiential continuum.

In spite of these reservations I welcome a book which - at a time when critical comments on Freud abound - tries to do justice to the boldness and importance of his thinking. However, like Freud's critics, Guy Thompson seems to me to be blind to the contradictions at the core of Freud's theory. Freud certainly wished to present psychoanalysis as a science, the psyche as an "apparatus" ruled by laws comparable to those of Newtonian physics, moved by an energy equivalent to physical energy. But Freud also had an utterly unscientific concern for meaning and a deep feeling for the powerlessness of "technical" intervention in the face of the incurable limitations of being human. Here is a conflict which Freud did not resolve, perhaps not even realized, though he expressed at various place an impatience with the inadequacy of his conceptualizations.

To present Freud as an existentialist is, in the end, a deeply unphenomenological move - for it leaves out too much of what we meet when we read him. It is, I suggest, a selective interpretation. To attempt to discover the "real" Freud - as already Lacan tried to do - throws up the old question of our criteria for what is real and what is not. It is Freud's conflict that is real, and it is, in my view, an aspect of his greatness as a thinker.

Hans W. Cohn