Lillian Blumberg Mccall, who here takes vigorous exception to Hans Meyerhoff’s article “Freud the Philosopher” in the January COMMENTARY, has written often on psychoanalysis in these pages. Her contributions include “Does Psychoanalysis Cure?” (November 1950) and “The Hidden Springs of Sigmund Freud” (August 1954). Mrs. McCall has worked as a clinical and industrial psychologist and is presently engaged in writing a History of Honors at the University of Colorado under a Rockefeller grant. Mr. Meyerhoff, who replies to Mrs. McCall, is visiting professor of humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of Time in Literature.

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Lillian Blumberg McCall:

I sympathize with Hans Meyerhoff’s feeling that “so many words have recently poured forth from so many pens that the mind is surfeited . . . it is almost embarrassing to join in praise of Dr. Jones’s biography.” Those critics who reviewed all three volumes showed definite signs of intellectual exhaustion. John Dollard simply informed his readers that he had said everything already. Mr. Meyerhoff remarks that “this last volume has its flaws and defects: it does not achieve the same mastery over its diffuse and difficult subject matter that made the first volume such an exciting adventure.” Not a word about the nature of the “flaws and defects.” The atmosphere of piety is intolerably sticky. The idolatry touched off by the centennial, and reinforced by Ernest Jones’s adulatory biography, has made it almost impossible to discuss psychoanalysis seriously. Freud may have been a great man but he is not sacrosanct. A dissenting opinion is in order.

Everyone says of Freud that he was single-minded in the cause of truth. Yet there was at least one occasion on which he deliberately suppressed the truth. When he realized that the data from which he deduced the seduction theory were wrong, he did not publicly retract the theory but passed it over in silence. Not for many years—and only after his fame was secure—did he give an account of the incident. He admits, quite casually, that he may himself have “suggested” the seduction tales to his patients. It would be interesting to know—and it would shed light on the nature of “suggestion” in psychoanalytic treatment—whether patients continued to tell such stories as actual occurrences after Freud had decided these tales were wish fantasies. As far as I know, the question has not been raised in the professional journals.

On many occasions Freud, as we say nowadays, “resisted” the truth. He was fully aware that biologists reject Lamarck’s theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics and why they reject it. Writes Dr. Jones: “It is not easy to account for the fixity with which [Freud] held this opinion and the determination with which he ignored all the biological evidence to the contrary.” I suggest that Freud held to the Lamarckian theory with such “recalcitrance” for the most obvious of reasons: it was necessary for the logic of his system. Without the Lamarckian supposition the argument for many of Freud’s key theories falls apart. Dr. Jones admits this, but asserts that “there are alternative possibilities, e.g., along Darwinian lines, which would preserve the essence of Freud’s conclusions.” This would be a neat trick, but Dr. Jones does not pause to perform it.

Freud ignored his critics. Dr. Jones dismisses them with prejudice. The following is a bald-faced distortion by omission: “Kroeber, perhaps the most distinguished of American ethnologists, was thought to have delivered the coup de grâce to the concept of a primal crime by listing ten objections to it, but they contained little more than expressions of disbelief.” And so much for the man who is believed by many to be the world’s greatest anthropologist! Professor Kroeber’s ten objections indicate that the “facts” on which Freud built Totem and Taboo were at best dubious and at worst wrong, according to available anthropological evidence. Professor Kroeber’s intention, which Dr. Jones appears not to have noticed, was to criticize Freud’s procedure. He writes:

The above enumeration [the ten objections] has been compiled only far enough to prove the essential method of the work, which is to evade the painful process of arriving at a large certainty by the positive determination of smaller certainties and their unwavering addition, irrespective of whether each augments or diminishes the sum total of conclusions arrived at. For this method the author substitutes a plan of multiplying into one another fractional certainties—that is, more or less remote possibilities—without recognition that the multiplicity of factors must successively decrease the probability of the product. It is the old expedient of pyramiding the hypotheses, which, if theory had to be paid for like stocks or gaming cards, would be less frequently indulged in.¹

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Freud was aware of the reasons for the overwhelming rejection of the death instinct theory, but he shrugged them off with the remark that he could “think no other way.” Dr. Jones reports that all psychoanalysts have, by now, repudiated the doctrine. Mr. Meyerhoff states: “I am not competent to judge the clinical evidence. . . .” Lionel Trilling employs the same conceit of humility: “Whether or not Freud’s formulations of the death instinct stand up under scientific inquiry, I of course cannot venture to say.” Why not? The literature on the subject is extensive, and neither Mr. Meyerhoff nor Mr. Trilling can fail to be aware of it. The conceit of humility makes what is essential to the argument appear to be irrelevant. This, in turn, makes it possible to proceed as if the death instinct theory is true. For Mr. Meyerhoff the significance of the “death wish” is that it puts “one source of suffering within the organism itself. The human being is divided even in his deepest layers. . . .” For Mr. Trilling the death wish serves to “confirm our sense of Freud’s oneness with the tradition of literature. For literature has always recorded an impulse of the self to find affirmation even in its own extinction, even by its own extinction.” According to Freud, the death instinct is a characteristic of all forms of life which impels the organism to strive to return to an earlier inorganic stage. How Mr. Trilling can read “affirmation” into this theory escapes me. Nor is it clear to me how the death instinct puts “one source of suffering within the organism itself,” since the goal of the instinct is to rid the organism of suffering—by the negation of the self.

A man who is single-minded in the cause of truth does not deliberately ignore it. Yet Freud tells us that he purposely did not read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche because he had been told that their ideas were similar to his. As far as I know, the only other contemporary critic who has been struck by the strangeness of this boast is David Riesman. It seems obvious, as Mr. Riesman says, that Freud, in this instance, was most concerned with being thought original. Can anyone imagine a physicist choosing to ignore what has been done in his field?

Dr. Jones has described in detail the stubbornness with which Freud clung to some of his stranger ideas—particularly his belief in mental telepathy and Fliess’s weird biological notions. Although these ideas once greatly disturbed Dr. Jones, who tried to dissuade Freud from certain projects in connection with “thought transference” (because he feared that Freud’s odd ideas would give psychoanalysis a bad name), he now treats them as the lovable eccentricities of genius.

One of the chief defects of Dr. Jones’s biography is this double standard of judgment. He does not hesitate to denigrate others in the name of psychoanalysis, but similar criticisms of Freud he calls “malicious” and “mendacious.” He is cautious about the living, but pulls out all the stops in his castigation of the dead. (I was amazed at how delicately he handled the question of Jung’s anti-Semitism. Such delicacy appears to me unnecessary, in the light of Jung’s close cooperation with the Nazis which continued into 1940.) Mr. Trilling was inadvertently led to infer from Dr. Jones’s use of the term “cyclothymic” that Otto Rank was a psychotic. It turns out that all Dr. Jones meant was that Rank sometimes suffered from moods of depression. Dr. Jones is, as we say in the trade, “emotionally involved.” He is always fretting that this or that one’s emotional instability will lead him to disloyalty. He is forever warning Freud, who doesn’t always listen. But always in the end Freud must admit that Jones was right again. What a dreary story! Was Freud a man or a government that loyalty should have been a matter of such urgency? Dr. Jones never concedes that the grounds for dissent, except where he himself dissents, can ever be anything but neurotic.

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Virtually all of Freud’s eulogists, like Mr. Meyerhoff, shift the argument about the validity of psychoanalysis to the “philosophical” level. Rather early in the exposition of Freudianism, its converts, ever fearful that the human intelligence is not equipped to grapple with the portent of Freudian thought, cautioned the public that psychoanalysis is a psychiatric therapy, a scientific theory, and a philosophy. This tripartite division has been of enormous tactical advantage to the Freudians, serving the same purpose as the doctrine of the double truth, a strategy for peaceful coexistence with science worked out by 19th-century religionists. Of a therapy we ask that it work, of a theory that it be verifiable, and of a philosophy that it excite the “moral imagination.” The psychoanalytic triple truth is intended to defeat any frontal assault on the Freudian citadel. Attack one stronghold and the Freudians are found to be defending the others.

Few of the eulogists mentioned psychoanalytic treatment. In the biography, Dr. Jones makes remarkably few claims for it. Freud, in his early papers, asserted that the success of the psychoanalytic treatment was justification enough for the psychoanalytic movement. It is impossible to overestimate the authority psychoanalysis derives from its early miracles. But as soon as it became evident—it did not for many years—that psychoanalysis failed as often as any other psychiatric treatment, the Freudians began to stress the “constitutional factor” in neurosis, and to insist that only philistines set any store by mere “results.” Psychoanalysts maintain that the treatment is justified despite its costliness, its lengthy duration, and its frequent failure, because it is the means by which psychoanalysis investigates human nature and seeks to verify its interpretations. Any attention given to the therapeutic failures of psychoanalysis—according to the psychoanalysts—is a disservice to the cause of pure science.

However, the bridge between psychoanalysis and science is exceedingly frail and likely to collapse under the lightest traffic. The psychoanalyst’s interpretations are true if the patient accepts them as such. But they are not false if the patient doesn’t; in such a case he is “resisting.” Unconscious resistance to the truth is a doctrine of psychoanalytic infallibility. Ernst Kris wrote in 1947: “. . . the interest of psychiatrists, who alone have access to the full set of observational data, can hardly be expected to center on problems of semantic and systematic clarifications at a time when the rapid advance of clinical insight attracts their attention. A time lag exists even between clinical experience and published case histories; the clinical tradition, at the present time, is richer and both more concrete and more precise than the psychoanalytic literature tends to reveal.” The psychoanalysts still haven’t found time for “problems of semantic and systematic clarifications.” Still, we are supposed to believe that psychoanalysts know what they are doing, and that they know more than they are able to tell us about what they are doing.

The key theories of psychoanalysis remain unverified. Given their form, their verification presents insurmountable difficulties. It is logically impossible to disprove a theory that explains all effects by a single cause. In his essays on Freud’s view of art and artists, Lionel Trilling implies that when a single explanation—fear of castration—is offered for contradictory consequences (e.g. for both impotence and “extravagant exploits of sexuality”) we know nothing more than we knew before. Art cannot be explained by the artist’s neurosis: “we are all neurotic” but we are not all artists. However, Mr. Trilling did not extend his remarks to rescue humanity at large from the indignities of reductionism. He merely exempted artists from the Freudian canon.

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If Freudianism fails as a therapy, and if its scientific claims are dubious, it is nevertheless put forward as a profound view of life. But this view of life presents us with certain problems in the sphere of morality and ethics. As Mr. Meyerhoff says: “. . . I am not sure that we have even begun to think seriously about the baffling consequences that this new look of man has for such problems as human motivation, freedom, and responsibility.” Having raised this question, Mr. Meyerhoff immediately drops it. Perhaps because there can be no conception of freedom and responsibility in a system that attributes the motivation of all human behavior to unconscious, irrational, and conflicting forces over which consciousness has virtually no control?

Later, Mr. Meyerhoff remarks, “. . . it is curious to note that the Christian dogma of ‘original sin,’ which . . . corresponds to Freud’s doctrine . . . again commands a respectful hearing. Apparently what makes good sense in a theological context, where the evil is absolute, does not make any sense in a natural or human setting, where, as Freud insisted, man might at least achieve some mastery over himself.” I assume that the portion of psychoanalytic doctrine Mr. Meyerhoff has in mind to which original sin corresponds, is the primal crime—the murder of the primal father by his jealous, unruly sons. It is possible to uphold the position that neither original sin nor the primal crime makes sense in any setting. Given the fantastic possibility that the unconsciously inherited memory of the primal crime—assuming that it ever took place and that a specific memory trace can be inherited—could be brought, somehow, to the consciousness of every human being, would it help us to solve any of our present human problems in our present human setting? Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, indicated that there was virtually no hope that “man might at least achieve some mastery over himself.” Mr. Meyerhoff quotes a famous passage to that effect. Is it strange, therefore, that “the standard practice is to affirm the truth of Freud’s discovery and then to proceed as if it didn’t make any difference”? If Freud is right what difference can it make? There are no elect in the Freudian neo-Calvinism. Mr. Meyerhoff’s complaint is that everyone pays lip-service to Freudianism, but few are really religious. This has been the complaint of every religion once it has become institutionalized.

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Many of the eulogists, including Mr. Meyerhoff, used the occasion of the centennial for broadsides against the so-called cultural deviationists. The revisionists are highly vulnerable targets. They substitute one monism for another, their theories are as unsusceptible as Freud’s to verification, and the results of their treatment are equally questionable. But the Freudians do not attack them on methodological but on philosophical grounds. To attack them methodologically would mean opening up the Freudian system itself to painful examination. Instead, the revisionists are accused of being light-minded optimists. But is a pessimistic theory founded on false premises any “deeper” than an optimistic theory founded on false premises? The Freudians are attacking, through the revisionists, the tradition of the Enlightenment which holds that man is a rational animal who can solve his problems through the use of his intelligence.

At the philosophical level one does not argue with psychoanalysts, but with their literary followers. Freud was a great literary stylist, and literary men have always stood guardian over his ideas. Theirs has been the responsibility for maintaining the intellectual “tone” of psychoanalysis. The literary men, not the psychoanalysts, bring forward for discussion the particular aspects of Freudian speculation that are relevant to the current intellectual climate. These change with the times. In the 20’s, the rationalistic, optimistic elements of Freud’s thought were used to attack Victorian morality. Today, Freud’s “tragic view”—man as an irrational animal self-doomed to extinction—commands Freud’s literary followers. Whatever view of Freud is current in any given time tells us as much about the mood of the period as it does about psychoanalysis itself. The Freudian psychology has shown itself highly adaptable to the needs of the Zeitgeist because psychoanalysis, like all monistic systems, is full of ambiguity, inconsistency, contradiction. There are as many interpretations of Freud as of Marx, each claiming to be the Word.

Jerome Bruner, a Freudian fellow-traveler, says of psychoanalysis that it “is not a theory in the conventional sense, it is a metaphor, an analogy, a way of conceiving man, a drama.” That is, Freudianism is “true” in the sense that Hamlet is true—but not in the sense that the Copernican theory is true. At least, not yet. Freudianism has attracted many of the disillusioned converts of another thinker whose words were thought to be sacred in the 30’s. Hardly anyone now asks how much of the truth Freud actually discovered, but the question remains open. It is the crucial question.

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Hans Meyerhoff:

I cannot, of course, speak for the others mentioned in Mrs. McCall’s communication, but since it was my review-article of the Jones biography which triggered her thoughts, I shall reply on behalf of my own treatment of Jones and Freud.

To the late Dr. Jones I owe an apology: I did not review his book on its own terms. Instead, I picked out a special problem and wrote my article around it. In the final chapter, Dr. Jones suggested that the widespread acceptance of Freud’s ideas may actually be “a subtle form of rejection, a protection against assimilation of their profound import.” I am glad to record that there is nothing subtle about Mrs. McCall’s rejection; but I seem to have failed in conveying the theme of my article. It was not a standard review. Thus I did not spell out the “flaws and defects”; I did not spell out the virtues either. One reason for not dwelling upon the shortcomings of this last volume was that they were obviously due to the fact that the work was completed in a race against death: Dr. Jones died on February 11.²

Nor was it my intention to debate or to defend the truth of psychoanalysis. What I tried to do was pursue the specific point raised by Dr. Jones in his concluding chapter and to show, by a number of examples, how our culture seems to have absorbed and transformed Freudianism into something which has little or nothing to do with Freud’s own ideas. I noted in my review (as does Mrs. McCall) that “Freudian psychology has shown itself highly adaptable to the Zeitgeist”; but my point was precisely that the Zeitgeist is not Freud’s Geist. This is not to make a religion out of Freud; it is a comment on our culture. If the point is worth making at all, it ought to be made in the way in which somebody might criticize the distortions of Marx in Soviet ideology, or the misuse of Nietzsche’s ideas by the Nazis.

My small contribution to this subject, however, is not what Mrs. McCall is really shooting at; she is after bigger game. Her chief concern is to assail (a) the truth of psychoanalysis and (b) Freud’s personal honesty. Unfortunately, she does not distinguish between these two objects of her attack, though they are quite different: at one level she offers a critique of a scientific theory, at the other she casts a grave slur upon a man’s character. (She confused these issues in her treatment of Dr. Jones, too.)

I have little to say on the first point, since this is not the place for a serious, technical debate. Everybody knows (as Freud did too) that psychoanalytic treatment is not the only cure for emotional disturbances; and everybody knows that there are still people who think psychoanalytic theory is hogwash from beginning to end. But the perennial refutations of psychoanalysis are by now becoming rather tedious. Freud’s basic contributions, not unlike those of Marx, have a way of surviving both their vulgar distortions and their learned refutations. In any case, Mrs. McCall’s critique raises only one genuine issue, i.e. her complaint that “verification presents insurmountable difficulties” in psychoanalysis. To put it differently, psychoanalytic propositions are often such that it is very difficult to specify objective tests which could verify (or falsify) them. That is, indeed, a serious problem, but it is hardly news to anyone at all familiar with the subject. What Mrs. McCall fails to tell her readers is that theoreticians in the psychoanalytic movement, including the late Ernst Kris, have been working on this problem for a long time. Nor is it the only logical difficulty encountered in psychoanalytic theory; but these are matters which the reader seriously interested in logical problems can study elsewhere.

There is no need to conceal these difficulties; they are characteristic of many revolutionary scientific theories. Let us take the example of quantum mechanics: it is an ingenious theory; in its application to the manufacturing of bombs, it may even offer a radical solution to what ails mankind; but in addition to these scientific and practical aspects, quantum mechanics also presents a great many philosophical puzzles which are by no means resolved—and which interest some people beyond the making of new discoveries or new bombs. Now what Freud called “metapsychology,” his over-all theory of man and culture, is a kind of philosophy, too, even though he did not like to think so. Hence there is nothing wrong with considering these ideas in a philosophical or historical context. I did not trick the reader by shifting the argument “to the philosophical level.” Philosophy happens to be my field, and philosophical problems arise in connection with any scientific theory.

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These points would hardly require a rejoinder, were they not tied in with the major theme of Mrs. McCall’s communication: her assault upon Freud’s intellectual integrity. First, according to her, Freud “deliberately suppressed the truth” in the case of his original belief that the seduction tales told by his patients were true in the literal sense. The basis for this attack is a testimony to one of Freud’s finest hours. For the original mistake, which caused him a great deal of anguish, was the source for the exciting discovery (and truth) that the wish might be as significant as the deed in the economy of the psyche. What more do we expect of a man than to admit that he first made a mistake, but that the mistake, fortunately, gave him a clue to a great insight? I wish mistakes like that would happen to me.

Secondly, Freud “deliberately ignored” the truth, in that he refused to read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, because he was told that “their ideas were similar to his.” I am inclined to think that he read both of them—philosophers, by the way—and had an especially high regard for Nietzsche. But the question is not whether he did or did not know their works, but what his motive may have been for not reading them, or for not remembering that he had read them. Fear of losing his claim to originality, as Mrs. McCall says? Now Freud was certainly human enough to care whether his discoveries were original. It so happens that they were; for neither Schopenhauer nor Nietzsche, despite their greatness and originality, discovered psychoanalysis. Freud did. Besides, why suspect a bad motive when there may be a better one? Freud did not hesitate to acknowledge his debt to the great poets and writers who knew the “truths” of psychoanalysis long before he came along to discover its “method.” Thus if he shied away from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, it may have been because he was afraid lest psychoanalysis be tainted by too much exposure to philosophical speculation. Freud struggled hard to keep on the straight and narrow path of science—whether he succeeded or not. It was only in his old age that he freely admitted he was returning to the philosophical interests which he had resisted all his life.

Finally, Freud “ignored his critics,” particularly Kroeber’s critique of Totem and Taboo. Only he didn’t, not in this case at least, as Mrs. McCall might have learned from reading Moses and Monotheism. What he did was to stick to his guns despite the criticism: “I have often been vehemently reproached for not changing my opinion in later editions of Totem and Taboo, since more recent ethnologists have without exception discarded Robertson Smith’s theories and have in part replaced them by others which differ extensively. I would reply that these alleged advances in science are well known to me. Yet I have not been convinced. . . . Contradiction is not always refutation; a new theory does not necessarily denote progress. Above all, however, I am not an ethnologist, but a psychoanalyst. It is my good right to select from ethnological data what would serve me for my analytic work. . . .”

Now this may again show what a stubborn character Freud was, but it may also show something else. Perhaps he was willing to take certain risks of being wrong which lesser men do not take in order to be always right. The mistakes of genius are often worth more than the discoveries of little minds, and if Mrs. McCall thinks I am again indulging in sententious, pious eulogy, let her be reminded of another case: Einstein believed in the philosophy of Spinoza, including the postulate of a universal causal determinism in nature, even though the theories of modern physics—to which he had made such revolutionary contributions—rendered this belief rather silly in the eyes of his scientific peers.

Nor am I prepared to say that Freud was simply wrong in Totem and Taboo. I don’t know enough about the matter to pass judgment. Mrs. McCall calls this attitude “the conceit of humility”; she has forgotten that there are times when fools rush in. . . . At any rate, it is no news that the public, including the experts, greeted Totem and Taboo with skepticism and scorn. Perhaps it is news that this “fairy tale” seems again to be treated with more respect. If Mrs. McCall cites the authority of ethnology, others can, too. “I am convinced that the essential universality of the Oedipus complex and of sibling rivalry is now established by the anthropological record.” Thus Clyde Kluckhohn in a personal communication to Dr. Jones. Mrs. McCall may quote one eminent authority; I cite another. The final verdict, obviously, isn’t in yet. That is precisely what Freud said in 1939.

I don’t know whether this amounts to another eulogy, but I have no reason to evade the issue. Freud prevailed over the worst possible abuse and vilification to become “a maker of the modern mind,” as the phrase goes. Mrs. McCall says he “may have been a great man, but he was not sacrosanct.” Who said he was? Freud never claimed infallibility for himself—as Dr. Jones has shown abundantly and movingly in the three volumes of his biography. Greatness will do for praise. There is little enough in our world as it is; and compared with his critics and his epigones, Freud looms like a giant. It is embarrassing to have to defend him again—at this time, in these pages, and against such scurrilous charges. Freud would not have thought it worth bothering.

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¹ I am indebted to Professor Omer Stewart, chairman of the Anthropology Department at the University of Colorado, for calling my attention to Professor Kroeber's two papers on Totem and Taboo, and for many interesting discussions on Professor Kroeber's progressive disillusionment with psychoanalysis.

² It would be a fitting tribute to Dr. Jones, I think, if somebody were to take the massive work he has left and make a finished (perhaps one-volume) product out of it.