Book Review: Approaching Psychoanalysis: An Introductory Course

"By God, sir," sez I to myself. "If yer man Freud was about the premises, wouldn't he have a word or two to say about turning the old arses toward the alleged perverts?" (McCourt, 1999).

My first thought about this book as I begin its review, is that its title does not fit with my view of what has been achieved by its having been written at all. A more apt title might be, "Psychoanalysis: (never mind the approaching), The Book of Revelation." Would that this book had been written when I began my training as a psychotherapist all those many (ten) years ago. It surely would have wised me up to the very real possibility that I would make serious misjudgements on the course my training pathway would take me. As it was, I wasted much time, emotional energy and money finding myself in a training school where Freud was vilified as a monstrous psychopath despite the fact of there being a lack of understanding of Freudian theory and only a minimal acquaintance with his writing.

That which is both revelatory and revolutionary about this book is that, at last, many of the myths and muddled thinking propounded by teachers and practitioners of psychoanalysis have been replaced by hard evidential data. Take, for instance, Freud's theory of human sexuality; many call it blasphemous as they have not read this book and, therefore, have no understanding of what Freud actually said on the subject. The above quote of McCourt illustrates this misunderstanding; he was marching in a St Patrick's Day parade in New York City and decided to show solidarity with the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organisation. When this group marched past the viewing podium, the dignitaries to a man turned their backs on it. Gays are sexually deviant! Smith, with meticulous precision, dismantles this and other myths and misconceptions of Freudian theory by reviewing its historical evolution from the earliest publications to those of current thinkers and writers. 'Freud believed that all human beings are originally bisexual...We are born with the propensity to love both men and women. During the course of development, this disposition is usually constrained, and we become heterosexual or homosexual.' And he writes further, 'Homosexuality is not a "perversion" because it is not appropriately described in terms of a component drive or a piece of foreplay highjacking genital sexuality'. (p60-61).

The quote marks around the word perversion puzzle me; does Smith have the same difficulty as I have had with it? My attempt to present a paper for evaluation to a tutorial group studying existential philosophy and technique was scuppered as I had dared use the forbidden word that the Gay political movement seeks to eradicate from the English language. The offending noun, it is declared, is not permitted because it contains within its meaning a judgement and pejorative stance. As Smith reveals, Freud used the word homosexuality and the concept "contrary sexual feelings" both as 'innate, non-pathological disposition[s] towards same same-sex love' and a way of describing 'occurrent sexual activities, fantasies, and attitudes'. (p60). Thus, in a flash, Smith succinctly demuddies a common misapprehension of Freudian theory. Homosexuality is not an illness, vice or unnatural state requiring a cure or urgent treatment, but, like heterosexuality, may be expressed in ways so as to alleviate guilt and shame. It seems to me that if Freud's message could be correctly heard, certain actually perverse, maladaptive and dangerous practices such as prostitution, "cottaging", substance addiction and rent-buying could be understood and modified. Such activities are forms of a repeated and re-enacted exorcising of guilt and shame ensuing from a desire for forbidden sexual activity.

However, this can hardly be a starting revelation to readers of this Journal although my experiences tell me otherwise. I recall gatecrashing a gathering of distinguished teachers and practitioners of the art of psychotherapy organised by the School of Psychotherapy and Counselling at Regent's College. The guest speaker was an American psychoanalyst who had enraged and deeply offended the Gay movement on both sides of the Atlantic by writing about his professional experiences with male homosexual clients and the guilt that had followed homosexual activity. His efforts were in vain as both the ticketed and invading and heckling members of the audience accused him of hypocrisy and homophobia for the apparent condemnation of his own son for his homosexual behaviour. It occurs to me in hindsight that what was missed by those enraged was the possibility that both the speaker and his son accepted the right of us all to be allowed freedom of sexual expression and that this choice cannot be defined as deviant, unnatural or bad. Even more astonishing, as Smith makes clear, Freud agrees with both; it is an innate quality of human nature that emotional love can be expressed in relationship with another individual of the same gender.

Nevertheless, our sexual desires are, in most cases, prohibited and their practice is deemed to be criminal activity as in the case of the arrests of George Michael and Hugh Grant, eerily enough, both in Los Angeles. Thus, the seeds of guilt are sown reeking havoc in the inner world of the offender. Our closest genetic rival, the bonobo or pygmy chimpanzee solves all interpersonal conflict with the practice of sex. And when I say all, I mean just that—male to female, male to male, male to female child, female to female child. It is a uniquely human trait to call any of this activity perverted. Smith's precision in making this utterly vital point forces me to think the unthinkable. Perhaps those advocates and practitioners of paedophilia have a worthy point to make when they argue that sex between an adult and child is not perverted sex, it is healthy and fun. But this is far too dangerous a matter to consider at this moment.

As the Course progresses, Smith painstakingly directs his student through the historical evolution of psychoanalytic theorists and craftsmen and women. Throughout the institutionalised part of my training, Freud was presented to me in many diverse ways from his never having had a seduction theory to his creative discovery, through cocaine, of the Oedipus Complex that would single-handedly explain the nature of human existence. Smith clears away the hopeless historical muddle. The criticism by Jeffrey Masson is substantiated; Freud abandoned the seduction theory 'driven by the fear of social opprobrium to claim that the confessions of his patients were merely fantasies stemming from infantile sexual desire for their fathers.' (p34). Here is a vitally important dispelling of a commonly held myth; Freud is wrongly accused of abandoning the abused child for the purpose of inuring himself against public disapproval. Smith demonstrates that Freud never denied the importance and harmful affects of child abuse. That which he did relinquish was his own ill-informed 'dogma that the cause of hysteria is always an unconscious memory of sexual abuse.'(p36).

Smith, as both philosopher of science and Freud scholar, brings to his research an investigation of matters of great import to practitioners of any modality of psychotherapy. The physical notion of linear causality and Freud's "psychical determinism" come into microscopic view. This theory of the philosophy of scientific naturalism, that the human mind is a product of the Darwinian law of evolutionary science, has much to augment our understanding of human nature. It is the view that mental phenomena are not different to physical phenomena in that everything in existence has a cause and that relational causality conforms to the laws of natural science. As Smith points out, this has immense implications for the practice of psychotherapy for, if no thought or memory is random (just happens to be), then anything coming to mind or coming into one's conscious thought has a cause which gives it specific meaning and is not meaningless to the thinking and feeling individual. He addresses the philosophical dilemma that seems to preoccupy existential thinkers to the point of distraction, the Cartesian concept of dualism. Descartes argued that human beings are made of two distinct entities, mind and body or soul and body and that the body can be measured scientifically in terms of spacial-temporal location. Mind (or soul) is not material substance and impossible to subject to scientific scrutiny. However, since Descartes, scientific research in the areas of evolutionary biology, physics and neurology show that the human mind (soul or spirit) is a function of the brain (the computer analogy). When the individual brain dies and no longer functions, so does the soul apart from its memory living on in the mind of another living creature.

As a practising psychotherapist and militant atheist, I am able, through Freudian theory as clarified by Smith, to provide myself with a handy get-out clause. Spirits do exist but only in the minds of the living. This understanding allows me to be with a bereaved client and his pain in loss. That quality of being is as real as the pen that writes these words; the difference in the two is tangibility. I can hold this pen and touch these computer buttons but I cannot hold the words that they write as they are merely very sophisticated symbols. Freud argued in favour of a revolutionary philosophical notion; there is a solution to the mind-body problem. This is that mental processes are identical to brain processes, they are one and the same. Existential thinkers and writers traditionally attack Freud for his attempts to define human nature by the principles of scientific accountability in their belief that a science of human beings is a contradiction in terms, a logical impossibility. Freud's stance left him exposed to attack by the ruling Christian orthodoxy which sought to put Homo Sapiens at the centre of the known universe and at the top of the ladder of evolutionary development. His ideas were too dangerous for the ruling power elite. I noticed that the Pope's recent attempt to apologise for the past misdemeanours of the Roman Catholic Church completely ignored the part it played in the attempted extermination of the Jews during the last century. Other powerful Western politicians issue joint statements discouraging the practice of scientific research for fear that it might unravel the mystery of life, thereby undermining the false notion of the sanctity of human life. Should this "truth" be exposed, the most powerful use of coercion through fear will be made void and the control of the masses through brainwashing will become much more difficult.

As a philosopher of science, Freud wished to separate that which we know to be true from that which we believe to be true. A recent editorial in the daily Mail concerns itself with the matter of the nature of human beings. 'We [human beings] are products of the natural order. Our health and our sanity depend on our maintaining that order and our links with it' (O'Hear, p.6). The author cites as an example of natural disorder 'a life lived in an environment consisting entirely of concrete, glass and air conditioning.' Do any of you Journal readers know of any human or other sentient being who lives in such a condition? He argues that pig cloning is an act of natural disorder because it could lead to a pig virus infecting its human host that has no immunity to it. Then, the author borrows his own argument; he refers to the monkeys in a world of natural order infecting the human species with the AIDS virus, and protects his soft underbelly with a conclusion that we do not understand why these things happen. The contradiction is manifestly clear; on the one hand, we are part of the natural order of the universe, yet some of our actions are assaults on that order and are, therefore, unnatural.

How can this be? How can we be part of an orderly system and also attack that order at the same time by engaging in genetic research? This view is itself an attack by those who believe that human beings are outside and above the nasty and unpleasant world of natural science. It is an assault on the very essence of human nature, which is that we humans are a product of evolution as is every other mode of being in the known universe. It seeks to give the human the potential for divinity but it is only Jesus and a self-promoting Pope who manage to realise this potential. Christian philosophy, by means of its dogma of original sin, states that all humans are innately bad. On the contrary, as Smith reveals, Freud was a true phenomenologist; he sought to build his theoretical construction on the bedrock of observable data and to question preconceived notions that stifle human creativity and stunt the gift of Einsteinium curiosity.

As this report is already far too long, I will allow myself the pleasure of skipping over the middle part of the book where Melanie Klein resides. She is very much in the writing style of Heidegger, Germanic and turgid. They have more than this in common; the author under review in this paper, in his position as my academic supervisor, described Klein's contribution to psychoanalytic theory as monism. For me, the similarity between the two is obvious. There was only one good idea and it was repeated ad nauseam in an overbearing and obscure writing style. The great disappointment about this book is that Smith failed to include the great contribution of the modern psychoanalytic theorist and philosopher of science, John Bowlby. I have heard it said in the existential arena that Bowlby would have been insulted if he were called a philosopher. Again for me, Bowlby is not only a distinguished philosopher of science, but also, like Freud, a dedicated phenomenologist building his theory on observable data. As I understand both Freudian and Bowlbian theory, both men would be wholly insulted if they were not considered to be well-grounded philosophers. Hopefully, Smith's exclusion was only that there was not enough space in his book for the master and that his next work will be a volume dedicated entirely to his work.

In the meantime, I wish to call to the attention of deans, directors, principals and professors of all psychotherapy-training establishments; this book must be essential core text and a prerequisite reading for acceptance on a training programme.

References

McCourt, Malachy (1999) A Monk Swimming. London: HarperCollins.

O'Hear, J. (March 15th, 2000) The Daily Mail. London.

Mary Henderson