Perhaps nothing so well characterizes the problematic career of depth psychology over the past fifty years as the seemingly endless chain of contradictory theories—all claiming to point to the one psychological “truth”—which have been put forward by its devotees and practitioners. Indeed, so numerous are the conflicting interpretations of personality, illness, and treatment now available to the layman that any serious attempt to assess them all should probably lead us to wonder whether it is any longer even reasonable to take depth psychology seriously.

Yet it was once easy to do so, or at least much easier than it is today. There was a time when Freud convinced many of us that things like the Oedipus complex, infantile sexuality, repression, and the unconscious existed; that slips of the tongue, toilet training, dreams, and forgetting were far more significant than we had ever imagined; that, because of the reality and power of the unconscious, the present was but the past interestingly and deviously dressed up; and that, more generally, a naturalistic, “scientific” theory of man, based upon the thrusts and counterthrusts of instincts and drives, had been demonstrated. Perhaps it was Freud’s passion, or his insistence, or what seemed like his utter clarity. Or perhaps it was just because we were ready at that time for that kind of story. In any case, somehow, he convinced us.

This is not to say that no one had reservations about Freud. Some, for example, were concerned with the sort of thing that was taken to be evidence for his theories. According to Freud, the fact that patients completed treatment, and were “cured,” verified his theories because the treatment, and thus the cure, were based logically upon them. But therapists who based their treatment on non-Freudian theories also cured patients. Couldn’t these therapists make the same claim for their own theories? And in the light of this situation, what did, or could, being “cured” prove?

Other critics expressed doubts about the nature of Freud’s evidence from a different point of view. They wondered whether Freud’s clinical findings, the original evidence for his theory, would not have been different had he investigated a more diverse group—that is, if his patients had not all been upper-middle-class Europeans. Still others were puzzled by the revisions, qualifications, and additions each of Freud’s new books seemed to contain. With all these changes, was the theory still consistent? Were the changes an expression of Freud’s flexibility and openmindedness, the non-dogmatic nature of his inquiry, or was that inquiry, and the methods it utilized, simply incapable of yielding definite and durable conclusions? And when all these and other doubts were doctrinairely rejected as “resistance,” many really felt like resisting.

Nevertheless, most people continued to listen carefully to Freud; they treated his notions seriously and took them to be quite important. This was so, I suspect, because despite their reservations, they seemed to recognize themselves in what he said. They felt that Freud’s inquiry, his investigation, had discovered and illuminated aspects of themselves which they had overlooked or, more likely, kept hidden; and that because his theory included these dimensions, these secret crevices of their psyches, it was a theory which embraced the full reality of man. Thus, even though Freud’s portrait was candid, applied no cosmetic, and didn’t conceal what men wanted their public portrait to conceal; even though it startled, frightened, embarrassed, profoundly threatened and outraged them, they were captured, converted, and calmed by the beauty of what appeared to be its truth.

And, of course, there was the presumed cash value: the theory led to a practice, a therapy, a way of loosening the neurotic bonds in which people were (or thought they were) fettered. The system promised that the wounds received in childhood, the wounds which still festered inside, would be healed. And, wonder of wonders, those who went into therapy were healed. Or so it seemed.

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But then came the Freudians, both disciples and revisionists, who began to undermine the thought of the master and, I would suggest, the whole enterprise of depth psychology. They revised this notion and qualified that one, deleted a bit here and expanded a bit there, made central what had been peripheral and peripheral what had been central, extirpated one key concept and introduced another, decided what Freud must have “really” meant in certain passages and avoided others, and so on, throughout his shuddering corpus. It becomes clear, after navigating the murky, turbulent waters of Freudianism, that none of the fundamental thoughts of the master has remained invulnerable, that all of them are open to criticism and challenge. Whether it be the unconscious, the libido theory, the death instinct, the technique of free association, or the criteria for discharging patients as cured, there has emerged a Horney, an Erikson, a Reich, a Melanie Klein, or a Harry Stack Sullivan to put down the master. Each did so, of course, by citing clinical evidence: material, so to speak, from the couch. What is more, their rejections of Freud, which were reached by emulating both the style and the methodology laid down and used by him, necessarily carried as much weight as his initial assertions. His conclusions had been true because of clinical evidence, and, on the basis of the same criteria, so were theirs. The only trouble was that their conclusions contradicted his.

Now, since the Freudians have offered just as much evidence and the same kind of evidence for their replacement theories as Freud offered for his original ones, not only has it become theoretically impossible to adjudicate between the original claims and the counterclaims, but, more importantly, even the nature of the theories and of the evidence involved has become problematical. That is, it becomes questionable whether what happens in treatment—clinical material—is evidence at all, and whether the explanations which depth psychologists formulate to account for what they see are anything more than (sometimes) interesting speculations. For if therapeutic findings can both confirm and disconfirm the existence of the death instinct; if the progress of patients can count both for and against the assumption of the centrality of sexuality in the formation of illness; and if patients will validate dream interpretations based on contradictory theories about the existence of the Oedipus complex, then what this science takes as evidence is not evidence and what it formulates as theory is at best only loosely connected with facts and at worst completely arbitrary. Quite simply, if a theory and its negation can both be verified, then the theory is worthless, and if evidence cannot distinguish between contrary claims, it isn’t evidence: it makes nothing evident.

Thus, in doing the old man in, and “refuting” one another, those who sought to carry on what he had begun ended up revealing the arbitrary and ambiguous, if not amorphous, methodology which the entire enterprise rested upon, thereby refuting the enterprise itself as well. And since Freud himself had used and worked within this methodology—indeed, it was he who invented it in the first place—it is both unfair and oversimplified, in distributing praise and blame within Freudianism, to praise the master and blame the pupils. If it is true to say that Freud’s pupils were blind to the truth which he bequeathed them, it is equally true to assert that it was Freud who blinded them to it. The history of depth psychology is not an example of that process whereby a great man’s work is sullied and humiliated by small, unknowing, insensitive disciples. On the contrary, the master’s work, both in spirit and in letter, was carried on by his pupils, who merely made explicit what had already been clearly implied.

As one follows the history of the Freudian movement, then, one’s feeling of confronting a serious enterprise slowly evaporates. In the face of an interminable stream of theories and counter-theories, evidence and counter-evidence—much of which strikes one as speculative and specious—the whole business, no doubt awfully serious in the minds of its practitioners, begins to look like a game: pump the patient and make up a myth. Since myths are un-falsifiable, nobody loses (or wins). But since, in addition, there is nothing so tiresome as an old myth, prolonging the game requires the constant manufacture of new myths. Anticipating what has by now become a cultural norm (as in the world of art), those myth-makers who masquerade as depth-psychologists seem to be engaged in a compulsive search for novelty: to accept what has been done is to be a has-been; what has happened is not what’s happening. Looking back, one sees that the qualms we had about Freud’s ideas should have been taken as seriously as the ideas themselves; Freud, it seems, only told us the first myth. Would it not have been better to expose it as such then?

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Many of these suspicions regarding the nature of Freudianism are expressed, and elaborated upon fully, in Depth Psychology: A Critical History, by the European psychoanalyst, Dieter Wyss.¹ Specifically, Wyss marshals a number of telling arguments against such central themes as Freud’s hedonism, and its extension into the context of interpersonal relations; Freud’s dichotomy between pleasure and reality; Freud’s atomism, i.e., his preoccupation with symptoms and disregard of the total person; Freud’s solipsism, or what Wyss calls his “Cartesianism”; Freud’s claim that the ego is a “piece” of the id, and that, in effect, the self is a secondary, epiphenomenal entity; Freud’s sharp distinction between the conscious and the unconscious, the rational and the irrational, sleeping and waking; and so on.

With respect to all these, Wyss’s arguments are provoking and, to my mind at least, quite effective. He argues, for example, that Freud’s hedonism—his claim that men act only to get pleasure and avoid pain—is either false, insensitive to the realities of human behavior, or uninformative. For, on the one hand, people don’t act to get pleasure, they act to get more money, more food, a new house, or a new sexual partner; and they don’t act to avoid pain, they act to avoid personal injury, fights, accidents, hunger, rancid food, and the like. That is, pleasure and pain are abstractions, and men do not act either to get or to avoid abstractions; rather, they act in terms of concrete things, and pleasure, like redness, truth, and woman, is not a concrete thing. If, on the other hand, Freud means to distinguish activities like lovemaking, eating, listening to music, playing football, or even inflicting pain, from a feeling called “pleasure” which is produced by these activities and is qualitatively the same no matter which activity produces it, and to claim that people engage in the former only to get the latter, then, Wyss argues, Freud is grossly insensitive to the qualitative diversity of the pleasures men actually experience. The abovementioned feelings, which include such diverse pleasures as the inflicting of pain, sexual activity, the helping of another, aesthetic creation, and abstract thought, are crudely misdescribed if they are stripped of their differences, homogenized and abstracted as “pleasure” one and single. Finally, if Freud grants that pleasures are different, and that people seek the pleasure of love-making, reading poetry, going to the opera, taking a swim, etc., then, since what they seek is a plurality of pleasures, the reductive and monistic point of Freud’s hedonism has been considerably blunted, and to say that they all seek pleasure is to say something uninformative. It is like saying, “Every color is red, but there are blue-reds, orange-reds, purple-reds, etc.” What would a person be telling you if, having uttered this astonishing proposition, he answered your query about the color of your coat by saying, “It is red.” He might as well have said, “It is blue or orange or purple or. . . .”

Extending this line of criticism, Wyss argues that Freud’s antithesis between the pleasure principle and the reality principle is bogus, that this alleged opposition is not really an opposition at all. His argument here is reminiscent of Hegel, for it stresses the dialectical nature of the two poles. Pleasure, he points out, is experienced only when some transaction with reality takes place; it comes from, and couldn’t exist without, reality. It is therefore a crude misconception to take reality as merely the source of pain and frustration; for it is also, and perhaps more fundamentally, the source of pleasure and fulfillment. As Wyss says:

. . . in point of fact, whenever man engages in a productive relationship with reality, when he masters it, records it, plays with it or transforms it into a phantasy product, he experiences “pleasure.” In other words, the pleasure principle and the reality principle are not the fictive antitheses which Freud imagines them to be, but rather “pleasure” is generated when—and only when—the individual encounters and confronts reality in the widest possible sense of the word. This applies with equal force to a baby sucking at its mother’s breast and to an adult experiencing the pleasure of seeing some undertaking brought to a successful conclusion. In either case, and indeed in every case, reality plays its part. The concept of a pleasure principle diametrically opposed to a reality principle is a mere abstraction which has nothing to do with living reality, for pleasure and reality are necessarily related to one another, fused together, by virtue of their common link in man.

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Wyss correctly observes that Freud’s hedonism was a product of his reductionist, materialist metaphysics. He also points out that Freud (to his credit, although with no less inconsistency) was often unsure of his materialism. For example, Freud the reductionist believed that phenomenal experience, such as a feeling of sexual attraction toward one’s mother, could be reduced to, and was in fact nothing but, “a quantity of excitation.” On the other hand, Freud argued that this feeling of attraction is unconsciously repressed by the individual because it is sexual; it is precisely its quality, in other words, which is important in terms of psychodynamics. Herein lies the inconsistency. For if a sexual feeling toward one’s mother is dealt with the way Freud says it is and for the reasons he gives, it cannot be merely a qualityless state of energetic excitation; as such, there would be no reason to repress it. Repression occurs not because of the quantity of a sexual impulse toward one’s mother but because of its quality, because the impulse is precisely sexual and not, say, aesthetic. Freud’s theory of unconscious repression, then, depended upon the assumption that quality is real, while his materialist metaphysics, as we have seen, depended upon the assumption that it is unreal. Freud seems not to have been able to reconcile these two demands.

A similar inconsistency is indicated by Wyss in Freud’s analysis of drives. At times Freud spoke of drives as if they were purposive and goal-directed; at other times he spoke of them as if they were merely somatic events. For example, Freud often spoke of the sexual drive as constituted by its procreative goal; yet sometimes he spoke of it as goal-less somatic excitation. (To be sure, this goal-less somatic excitation motivates activity which results, more often than not, in procreation, but that is a contingent result and not a necessary part of the excitation as a sheer physical event.) Now, either a drive is sexual because more often than not it leads to procreation, or it more often than not leads to procreation because it is a sexual drive. Freud and the Freudians seesawed between these two conceptions; lest the distinction between them seem unimportant, let me point out that through minimal extension a difference in drive-interpretation can have serious consequences in therapy, where it becomes the difference between dealing with the content of a patient’s actions and dealing with the events—physical, physiological, or what have you—underlying those actions. Let us consider, for instance, the case of a draft-card burner. How the draft-card burner is treated by a therapist will differ according to whether his professed goal is accepted as the cause of his behavior and dealt with as such, or rejected in favor of a causal explanation in terms, let us say, of libido theory. (In the latter case, the patient’s rejection of governmental authority might be interpreted as a rejection by the patient of his father, a rejection based ultimately on the hatred felt by the patient toward his father when, in the Oedipal situation, the father’s actions resulted in the frustration of the patient’s libidinal impulses toward his mother.)

Freud’s philosophical twists and turns can be most clearly seen in his complete turnabout with respect to the nature of human aggression. Wyss’s discussion of this problem is particularly good. In his early phase, Freud believed that aggression was a reaction to a hostile, social reality. Man as such, homo natura, was not aggressive. Aggression, rather, was to be understood as a “secondary” phenomenon, resulting from a reflexive encounter with the environment. Theoretically, things could have been, or still could be, otherwise: if society were changed, man too would change. In this Freud followed Rousseau and the philosophes: the cause of the negativity of the human situation lay in the negative social order; to eliminate the negativity, one need only eliminate the order. Reich and many of the neo-Freudians concurred in this idea; others, like Ferenczi, Jung, and Melanie Klein, took a less rosy view.

On the other hand, Freud, in his late speculations, came to think of aggression as inherent in man, as (almost) original sin and therefore ineliminable. I refer, of course, to his final insights into the repetition compulsion and masochism, insights which led to his formulation of the theory of the death instinct and to the despair which pervades his late, so-called philosophical works. Freud came to believe that man, in his biological base, was driven by an urge to regress to an earlier, non-human state; and he interpreted aggression—both as externally directed sadistic or destructive activity and as internally directed masochistic activity—as the expression of that ineradicable urge. In a vision which was virtually demonic, Freud pictured man as a fallen creature, beyond hope or salvation. History led nowhere; it was merely the stage upon which those cosmic powers, Eros and Thanatos, performed their pointless and endless drama. Those, like Hegel, who saw history as the unfolding of Rationality, as the realization of Freedom on earth, were, to Freud, merely myopic.

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Finally, one comes to see that the problems Freud confronted, whatever they appeared to be on the surface, were at bottom metaphysical. His solutions, it must be said, were unoriginal, since they were by and large a restatement of what Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche had already said. To his credit, however, he at least realized the nature of the issues involved. The Freudians, it must also be said, were not so aware, but foolishly argued metaphysical issues in psychological and therapeutic terms. At the very least, they showed themselves in need of further therapy, since they never became conscious of what they were unconsciously about.

There is, of course, one group of depth psychologists which is not guilty of this charge. The group includes, among others, Jung, Rank, religiously-oriented psychologists like Victor Frankl, and existential or near-existential psychiatrists like Binswanger, Ey, and von Weiszäcker. We are, I might add, in Wyss’s debt for his lucid presentation of the views of the philosophically-oriented depth psychologists, particularly those of the existentialist variety, since their own writings are rather impenetrable and, in most cases, not available in English. These philosophically-oriented psychologists are quite conscious of the nature of their enterprise. Indeed, the theories which they—in particular the existentialists among them—articulate are most often straightforwardly metaphysical, and derive, to a greater or lesser extent, from Bergson’s vitalism, Husserl’s phenomenology, and Heidegger’s ontology. In fact, so great is the concern of these psychologists with Being, Beingness, Being-in-the-World, Being-Toward-Death, the Being-of-the-We, etc., that one begins to question the wisdom of calling them psychologists at all, rather than ontologists. To be sure, they still treat patients, but so have many men, wise and unwise, throughout the ages. And, of course, they “cure” these patients, but then again many patients become cured by getting older or by getting divorced or just by having somebody talk to them a lot about their problems.

Curing, it should be clear by now, ought not to be taken as proof of anything. Indeed, so far as treatment is concerned, it seems that the existential psychiatrists have only negative things to say. They condemn the Freudian method which, they feel, treats patients as mere objects. They urge therapists to relate to patients as an I to a Thou, to enter into the Lebenswelt of the patient, and to realize that the analytic-therapeutic situation is a Gestaltkreis.

But what, one wonders, does this imply for therapy? What, for instance, does a therapist, who believes all this, do when confronted by neurosis or psychosis? In what way should he act differently from a priest, a parent, a lover, a feeling person—all of whom can, and often do, share his ideas about the nature of human relationships? It would seem that either existential psychiatrists treat their patients as priests do, and are hence no different in kind from priests, or they do not treat their patients as priests do but rather as doctors do and hence, at least so far as practice is concerned, are really Freudians. Wyss also sees this as a dilemma but claims there is a third alternative. Unfortunately, he doesn’t say what it is. He does, however, offer some interesting, true, and honest thoughts on the cures effected by depth psychology:

It should be pointed out . . . that the successful cures achieved by psychotherapy are not the exclusive property of just a few schools but that on the contrary successful cures (which, due to the reservations to which this concept is also subject, are here understood as symptomatic cures) have been effected by each and every one of the various schools and doctrines. This is due to the fact that in every course of psychotherapy, although the methodology and the emphasis may vary from one school to another, the patient is always confronted with himself. Moreover, in every course of treatment, no matter what school or doctrine the therapist may espouse, the fact remains that a trained therapist applies himself to the patient’s problems for a large number of hours and often over a period of years. These two factors would appear to constitute the true principle underlying therapeutic success. On the one hand the patient is required to confront himself, to confront his weaknesses (defense, facade, persona), his potential talents, his world of drives and his world of ideas and above all, he is required to confront his own past. On the other hand there is the conversation with the therapist which, whether it be more of a monologue as with the Freudians or more of a dialogue as with the neo-Freudians and the philosophically-oriented schools, enables the patient to live through new and often shattering experiences.

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Thus, although these philosophically-oriented depth psychologists are more conscious of the metaphysical nature of their speculations than the Freudians, their speculations gain nothing from their greater self-consciousness: both their psychologies remain metaphysics and, as such, not scientifically significant. As Wyss says in his concluding chapter:

If the purpose of scientific inquiry is to organize data without making presuppositions and in accordance with a strictly objective empirical and logical method, then the scientific character of depth psychology is rendered questionable by virtue of its dependence on philosophical doctrines, and the relativity of interpretation to which this gives rise.

It is, we might say, possible to retort to this charge by declaring that every science rests upon metaphysical assumptions and that no science is presuppositionless. But such a rejoinder is not enough, for it fails to distinguish between one kind of metaphysical assumption (e.g., that Nature is lawful), which is, although not provable, necessary and universal, leads scientists to common interpretations of data, and allows the sciences to develop, and a second kind of metaphysical assumption (e.g., the existence of the Oedipus complex), which, although not provable, is neither necessary nor universal, doesn’t lead scientists to common interpretations, and hinders the development of a science by creating schools and warring factions within it. At the very least, the first kind of assumption has no element of arbitrariness about it, while the second is nothing if not arbitrary. Indeed, given that distinction, one might legitimately ask whether the first is a metaphysical assumption at all.

Freud, then, and all his heirs, whether consciously or not, have been engaged in metaphysical speculation, system-building in the classic sense. Interestingly enough, while Freud, in Vienna at the turn of the century, was undertaking to inject metaphysics into psychology, the most modern school of philosophy, in the form of the positivism of the Vienna Circle, was at the very same time rejecting metaphysics as a legitimate field of inquiry. (It did so on the ground that metaphysical claims and theories, since they implied and were implied by no empirical events, failed to satisfy the conditions under which statements have meaning. They thus were taken to be empty of meaning or meaningless.) One is tempted to say that in Vienna, at the beginning of the 20th century, the spirit of metaphysics, having been evicted from its chambers within philosophy, took a stroll across town and found lodgings at Freud’s place, in the new science of psychology. Freud, it seems, should have checked the new tenant’s references.

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