Abstract
In this thoughtful, compelling, and engagingly written book filled with attentive and detailed scholarship, Peter Rudnytsky “examines the interfaces between literature and psychoanalysis . . .”; it is intended as a “study in intellectual history that maps the origins of contemporary relational theory . . .” and “articulates [a] “vision of psychoanalysis as a discipline with the unique potential to conjoin science and hermeneutics . . .” (p. xi). In the seven chapters of its first half Rudnytsky follows stages in the development of the relational model from Freud’s early conceptions of psychoanalysis through those defined by the works of the major “disciples” up the point at which he sees the model to have been achieved. The long eighth and ninth chapters that fill the rest of the book cover Groddeck’s significant personal and religious influences on psychoanalytic theory formation, and issues relating to the scientific nature and the possible future of psychoanalysis.Pursuing the origins of the contemporary relational model, Rudnytsky identifies two conflicting trends in psychoanalytic theory. The first traces the gradual weakening of the oedipal paradigm and its replacement by the relational model; the second aims to relate hermeneutic concepts of psychoanalysis to those of the natural, especially biological, sciences. Rudnytsky is not merely a detached observer of historical developments; he seems intent on furthering the consolidation of object-relational models and then the mutual encounter of psychoanalysis and neuroscience. His tone reflects this: occasionally censorious, a bit deprecating, or impatient as he deals with Freud’s insistence on the centrality of the oedipal model, on his views of female sexuality, or on the surgical analogy in describing analytic technique. In dealing with Freud’s creative disciples, his tone seems more benevolent, sympathetic to their efforts and, at times, to their tragedies as well. To some extent Rudnytsky sees new theoretical developments in revolutionary, almost warlike terms. In line with this, a vague sense of guilt weighing heavily, of a crime having been committed somewhere, hangs over the first part of the book. Is it the assertion of independence by some disciples, their overthrow of the phallic-oedipal model, a dethroning of Freud? Nonetheless, Rudnytsky respectfully reviews the roots, aims, and deficiencies of conflicting views, as well as their possible contributions to psychoanalytic understanding.
Examining the “interface between literature and psychoanalysis,” he confronts the options of literature about psychoanalysis or of the contents of literature as a source of psychoanalytic data. Rudnytsky exploits the former option in his erudite reviews of Freud’s “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva” (1907) and the case of Little Hans (1909), two early texts that are markers of the developing oedipal paradigm. They evoke a Freud who has emerged from his self-analysis, come to his understanding of dreams, struggled with the seduction theory and the concept of libido, and gleaned the oedipus complex. In examining Gradiva, Freud reflects on themes already familiar— hysteria, desire, defense, conflict, and analytic cure—but also on a metaphor for repression: Pompeii, the buried city. The novel appealed to Freud’s fascination with archaeology and elicited an evident identification with the character Norbert Hanold as explorer and protagonist. Rudnytsky sees Freud so highly esteeming the creative writer (in this instance Jensen) “that he elevates Gradiva to the status of a case history” (p. 4). A “real” patient seems to emerge and is entered into the psychoanalytic database. Rudnytsky offers additional interpretations as well, finding in Hanold “rivalrous oedipal sexuality . . . hostility toward women and life, stemming from an internalized ‘bad mother,’ and a regressed or schizoid ego” (p. 13.), this last a theme he returns to later.
Rudnytsky reads Little Hans from a feminist standpoint “because it constitutes Freud’s quintessential depiction of the crystallization of masculine sexuality and identity” (p. 23). He suggests that Hans’s famous question “Mother, do you have a wiwimaker too?” was left fatefully unanswered and was responded to with misleading information. As Hans became the patient in the “first recorded instance of child analysis” (p. xii), Freud’s evolving conceptions of female sexuality (in part affected by Hans’s inquiries), male castration anxiety, and the oedipus complex guided Hans’s father in treating him. Rudnytsky takes serious umbrage at Freud’s later assertion that Little Hans “confirms everything” and sees Freud “functioning not as an impartial scientist but as a polemicist on behalf of a preconceived conviction,” a fact limiting the evidential value of Hans’s analysis for support of Freud’s initial assumptions (p. 38). Rudnytsky points to Freud’s close relationship with and active involvement in the affairs of Hans’s family; “among other things Freud may have been responsible for the decision to raise Hans as a Jew” (p. 51). Thus “he is presumably indirectly the agent of his circumcision” (p. 53). All this Rudnytsky finds incompatible with an impartial therapeutic stance toward the boy (p. 54). In a more conciliatory mode he sums up: “Despite taking Freud to task in both [Gradiva and Little Hans] for his a priori thinking, I stress the acuteness and honesty of his clinical observations and the inexhaustible richness of the case of Little Hans as a literary work” (p. xiii). It has come to serve in the psychoanalytic database “as a precedent” (p. 27). (A tastefully done, modest sculpture of Little Hans, placed at a quiet location in Vienna’s 9th district and marked in memory of his notable contribution to the early development of psychoanalytic knowledge, seems long overdue.)
Not until 1910 did Freud actually use the term Oedipus complex. But the notion of a “nuclear complex of the neuroses that comprises the child’s earliest impulses, alike tender and hostile, towards its parents and brothers and sisters . . .” covered its meaning (Freud 1909) as the “touchstone of psychoanalytic truth” (p. 59). Recognition of it (and of the centrality of the libido theory) would define loyal membership in the psychoanalytic movement. Freud too saw that this was a significant moment: “The infancy of our movement has ended. . . . I hope that a rich and beautiful youth is now coming” (quoted on p. 59). But Adler and Jung, definite “dissenters,” early moved on to develop conceptual systems and clinical techniques of their own.
Rudnytsky sees in Rank a pivotal link in the surmised arc of progress from the oedipal paradigm to the relational model. His careful review of Rank’s The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend (1912), “the greatest and most important single work of psychoanalytic literary criticism” (p. 70), shows it to fit Freud’s thinking at the time, including his views of the psychology of the creative writer. Rank sees literary works as “the completely personal, individually determined achievements of a unique psychic life” (p. 71). But Rank’s theory of creativity is a dynamic one, giving credit to lived and also commonly shared experience. Rank’s book provides classifications of the very large quantity of literary plots relating to the incest theme, their range “so vast as to defy summation” (p. 76). The book makes significant contributions to the incest aspect of the oedipus complex. Rudnytsky reviews the variations of some of these themes, referencing scripture, as well as classical and modern drama (there is a rare analysis of Grillparzer’s The Ancestress), and challenges Rank’s notion that greater instinctual repression by Christianity “could be maintained only at the cost of a most luxuriously developed activity of fantasy” (p. 78). He agrees with Rank’s claim that myths are projective phenomena (p. 83) but criticizes his “exclusive emphasis on the sexual wellsprings of artistic creativity,” thus relying “upon Freud’s theory of the drives.” He prefers alternative views such as Winnicott’s work on play (p. 84) but also recognizes the Freud of 1908: “The creative writer does the same as the child at play” (p. 144). In summary, however, reading the “incest” book is “to embark on a voyage of discovery” (p. 85).
In “The Ego and the Id” (1921) Freud not only maintained his lasting commitment to the oedipal model but also offered the structural theory (as part of the metapsychology), thus introducing an additional layer between listening analyst and disclosing patient. It also provided a new, conceptual level of discourse apart from and about the clinical discourse between analyst and patient (see G. Klein 1976). A revolutionary contribution, the work was a significant modification of established theory, a fact that helped open the way for further experimentation by his followers but brought opposition from others. In addition to developments within psychoanalysis, other circumstances, such as the weakening of traditional social structures following the Austrian and German defeats in the First World War, likely contributed to a new assertive spirit. Both Rank and Ferenczi had served in the war, and even Groddeck had had a brush with the military. They may have returned to their profession with greater independence of thought and modes of practice.
The publication of Rank’s The Trauma of Birth (1924) displaced Freud’s oedipal paradigm from its position of primacy “by foregrounding the mother-child bond” (p. 92). In doing this, Rudnytsky says, “Rank had the courage to risk opprobrium by defying Freud and taking him to task at once on intellectual and personal grounds” (p. 93). Rank sees the infant’s separation from the mother as the core problem of neurosis and addresses it as the central analytic task. Setting strict termination dates became a prominent technical device. In Rank’s view, the “concept of the birth trauma provides for the first time a real substrate for the psycho-physiological connections and relations” (p. 104). It becomes the analyst’s duty to prepare the patient for the “surgical cutting of this psychological umbilical cord with which the patient has always been burdened” (p. 94). Rank insisted that “active technique,” adhered to also by Ferenczi, provided clear control over analytic progress. Such preparation would be accomplished by actively bringing the separation issue into the analytic work. (Freud had offered a precedent here in his analysis of the Wolf Man). Rudnytsky rejects this perspective since it “defines development in terms of separations rather than of attachments and risks harming the vulnerable person whom one is seeking to help” (p. 95). Ferenczi, by contrast, advocated “indulgence” and “spoiling,” more like tending by a comforting mother, as a means of resolving aggressive elements on both sides of the analytic relationship, especially near termination, a sort of mutual redemption. Rank, in his dogmatism, “ironically remained too much like his erstwhile master in both his intellectual style and his somewhat surgical conception of the therapeutic process” (p. 106). Nevertheless, Rudnytsky credits Rank with ‘brilliance,” respects his prolific output, and says “there has never been a hero who did not walk with a limp,” as Oedipus was said to have done (p. 106). Rank’s view of actively bringing specific issues into therapeutic work (active technique), together with analysis of the therapeutic relationship itself, became a seminal force in the spreading development of nonanalytic psychodynamic short-term psychotherapies. It gradually estranged him from Freud and from others as well, including even Ferenczi later on. Rank’s implicit contribution to a relational model for psychoanalysis lies in his broadened recognition of pregenital issues, of the role and significance of the preoedipal mother, and of the analyst as an active participant in the analytic relationship.
In contrast to Rank, Ferenczi strove to retain good relations with Freud for a large part of his life. The early years brought him acceptance and approval. It was Ferenczi who produced a large volume of original clinical contributions, whom Freud had seen “as one who had ‘made all analysts into his pupils’” (p. 109), and whose Thalassa (1924) he praised “as Ferenczi’s most brilliant and most fertile achievement” (p. 114). Relying on a wealth of sources, especially Ferenczi’s voluminous correspondence with Freud and Groddeck (Ferenczi and Groddeck 1986) and his late Clinical Diary (Ferenczi 1985), Rudnytsky traces Ferenczi’s often conflicted efforts at establishing his independence and separate identity. They are manifested on one hand by Ferenczi’s speculative “theory of genitality” that he, “no longer confined to the ‘son role,’” had felt free to pursue (p. 114). On the other they were complicated by Ferenczi’s intermittent bouts of analysis with Freud (1914 and 1916) and dependence on Freud’s mediation when choosing his future wife (p. 117). And Freud could not approve of Ferenczi’s “need to cure and to help,” which led to deviations from classical technique: the “kissing technique,” mutual analysis, hypnosis, giving patients love (p. 116). In time Ferenczi revoked active therapy as duplicating sadistic parental intrusion. In the end the analyst was to be capable of humility and to reconcile with the patient.
Rudnytsky traces the gradual deterioration of Ferenczi’s relationship with Freud, as well as his efforts at independent theorizing and new views of clinical technique that Freud could not accept. But “we can understand how such a master of analysis as Ferenczi came to devote the last years of his life to therapeutic experiments, which, unhappily, proved to be vain” (Freud 1937, p. 230). Freud’s growing distance, that of a stern father incapable of bearing a maternal transference, would stimulate painful efforts to be reconciled and forgiven by Ferenzci. Unreconciled (unredeemed?), Ferenczi died a year before Freud. Rudnytsky summarizes: “As Ferenczi sought and obtained forgiveness from his patients for his trespasses against them, he forgave Freud’s trespasses against him. But analysis with Freud could never be mutual; he refused the mother’s role and was not given to tears” (p. 140). As Rudnytsky continues to trace the development of the relational mode, references to Freud diminish; no mention is made of his death.
When three of the most influential psychoanalytic books (Groddeck’s The Book of the It (1923), Rank’s The Trauma of Birth, and Ferenczi’s Thalassa (both in 1924), all offering modifications or departures from the oedipal model, appeared almost simultaneously, “psychoanalysis itself reached a crossroads: the choice between Freud’s new model of ego psychology and what we can now recognize to be the relational turn . . .” (p. 142). In his detailed scrutiny of the correspondence between Groddeck, Rank, and Ferenczi, and of Ferenczi’s late Clinical Diary, Rudnytsky recognizes new paths of communication serving the developing relational model (Falzeder and Brabant 2000). These paths supplement the traditional channels between analysts in Vienna and Berlin.
Groddeck, an independent hospital physician with early psychosomatic interests, had first contacted Freud in a letter of 1917 and then “appeared at the 1920 congress introducing himself as a ‘wild’ analyst (in German, he word for “wild” also means “unauthorized” or “trespassing”). Early in 1921 he also was to produce Der Seelensucher (The Soul Seeker), a novel Freud greatly enjoyed (Jones 1957, p. 78). The correspondence between Ferenczi and Groddeck (1982) offers an “indispensable window” into their budding friendship (p. 120) and provides details of Ferenczi’s difficult childhood, during which he “was subjected to severe emotional and sexual traumas chiefly by his mother and other female caretakers” (p. 122), including the “tragic moment when his mother declared ‘You are my murderer’” (p. 135). “Since the analyst must in some way fail—that is, murder—the patient, the criterion of a successful termination becomes whether the patient is able to forgive the analyst” (p. 139).
Rudnytsky regards The Book of the It as “by far the most profound and important” progenitor of the relational tradition” (p. 143) and “arguably the greatest masterpiece of psychoanalytic literature” (p. 163). Briefly he examines the problematic of the term it. While Freud acknowledged having adopted Groddeck’s term Es, he also asserted that Groddeck “no doubt followed the example of Nietzsche” (p. 144). But four years later, Rudnytsky reports, Groddeck protested that in “The Ego and the Id” Freud did “something which is the exact opposite of what I intended with the choice of the word ‘Es’. . . . The consequence is that my Book of the It is incomprehensible to all those people who accepted the later, Freudian meaning of the word” (p. 152). While for Freud the Id had become a system in his structural theory, Es meant to Groddeck the unrestrained play of multifarious sexuality in “defiance of the metapsychology of The Ego and the Id” (p. 174). Groddeck not only depicts masturbation as the primordial manifestation of human sexuality (“Self-gratification accompanies the person in one form or another throughout the whole of life” [p. 150]); a man of natural observation and practical experience, he also shows himself sensitive to manifestations of unconscious processes, conversion, and psychosomatics. This and the book’s direct, often folksy language, as well as its disrespectful view of medical and psychological authorities, made it a great public success. Its presentation in “epistolary form” (p. 163), as the correspondence between “Patrik” (the author’s pseudonym) and an imaginary female reader, creates a relational event. When “analytic” conversation emerges, it resembles “mutual analysis,” involving disclosures and interpretations by both parties. “Groddeck’s persona . . . harps on the inescapable conflict in the mother-child relationship.” In this mode of presentation Rudnytsky sees an “objective correlative for the interplay of transference and countertransference . . . a text that dynamically enacts the concepts it propounds” (p. 164).
Rudnytsky emphasizes Groddeck’s psychoanalytic friendships. Rank supplied him the perfect title for The Soul Seeker, a story turning on Christian themes. Most notably, “Ferenczi formed a bond of friendship with Groddeck in which each man found in the other the unconditional acceptance that neither had been able to obtain from Freud” (p. 153). In following the growing theoretical centrality of the mother, Rudnytsky finds Groddeck “a precursor of contemporary relational thinking because of his emphasis on the mutuality between patient and analyst in the psychoanalytic process.” Ferenczi and Groddeck both “were willing to risk a mutuality that was anathema to Freud himself” (p. 181). Both “go beyond Freud in their acknowledgment that the mother-child relationship is no less ambivalent than that between father and son” (p. 191). Relevant to these issues is Groddeck’s Christian engagement: Rudnytsky suggests that “Groddeck’s ideas function as a bridge between those of Freud and Winnicott . . .” (p. 188); both emphasize a “belief in childhood as repository of truth” (p. 193). He sees Groddeck as identified with Christ (p. 197) but also with Luther (p. 204).
At this point the relational model seems to have been achieved. (Some efforts of a relational stripe had also been made in nonanalytic therapeutic contexts, such as Sullivan’s conception of the therapist as participant observer.) Through trial and error the “subjective dimension of theory formation in psychoanalysis” (p. 182) became manifest in several stages. From adherence to Freud’s classical model of a “surgical,” abstinent analyst oriented by drive theory, there was a move to experimenting with “trespasses” and other compromises such as active or direct technique and mutual analysis. After that came increasing recognition of the mother as the source both of attachment and of trauma and conflict, and as an object of hate and aggression in the analytic relation. The analyst could appear as destroyer or murderer, leading to a need for ultimate reconciliation between the parties to the analytic situation, who as equals could forgive each other.
Rudnytsky refers to Kurt Eissler’s efforts (1953) to gather some of these developments as “parameters” into the realm of classical technique and to acknowledge the “ineradicable human element” in psychoanalysis. He refers also to Leo Stone’s work (1961) and to Hans Loewald’s efforts toward a synthesis of ego psychology and object relations theory (p. 211), the latter stressing the role of the analyst in offering a “new object” to the patient (Loewald 1960).
A paradigm shift has taken place. The oedipal model has been overcome: “what has taken place . . . is the belated revenge and ultimate triumph of the relational paradigm against the ego psychological paradigm that . . . seemed for the first half century to have routed it in the war of psychoanalytic ideas” (p. 209). Challengingly, Rudnytsky asks, “So what is there left to argue about?” In his view it “is the science question. In other words, what sort of discipline is psychoanalysis?” (p. 211). Rudnytsky’s review shifts here from crucial issues within psychoanalysis to concerns from without. There follows a detailed and absorbing review of intense debates regarding the nature of psychoanalysis: scientific or hermeneutic? The confusions here, he argues, “stem from a failure to grasp correctly the distinction between its theory and practice . . . between its metapsychological and psychological dimensions” (p. 219). He rejects Wallerstein’s view that the discipline has moved from a “one-person” to a “two-person” model, away from a natural science model to one of “subjective interactions” (p. 212; see Wallerstein 1998). This conflicts with Holt’s suggestion (1985) that “we must go to a nonbehavioral realm [neurophysiology?] . . . to test parts of clinical theory” (quoted by Rudnytsky, p. 213). Rudnytsky optimistically feels that a “fundamental change . . . has already taken place” and refers to Bowlby’s emphasis on the relevance of ethology and his drawing on earlier studies of attachment (Harlow 1958; Spitz 1945; see Bowlby 1989), as well as to Fairbairn’s elevation of “object seeking” over “pleasure seeking” as a motivation for human behavior (p. 214; see Fairbairn 1944). He concludes that “hermeneutic superstructure must be firmly grounded on a base of scientific theory” (p. 218) but dismisses Eissler’s attempt to conceptualize the clinical encounter “in terms of an alien model of natural science” (p. 222). Rudnytsky also refers to Loewald: “The analyst may become a scientific observer to the extent to which he is able to observe objectively, the patient and himself in interaction” (p. 222). He rejects Grünbaum’s view that psychoanalysis is a natural science as overlooking the “presence of consciousness in human beings. . . . there is a real ‘asymmetry’ between natural and human sciences . . .” (p. 224; see Grünbaum 1993). The two modes of inquiry provide answers in terms of “causes” and “reasons,” respectively (Home 1966, quoted on p. 231). The same arguments had been made by Klein (1976) and Hartmann (1927), the latter of whom invoked Dilthey’s well-known distinction between science and the humanities as, respectively, explaining and understanding disciplines.
Rudnytsky refers approvingly to a “central” claim advanced by hermeneutic philosophers . . . that it is imperative to make a distinction between the human and the natural sciences,” and joins Home (1966) by referring to “causes” and “reasons” as answers to the question of how a thing occurs (p. 231). Bowlby’s distinction between the art of psychoanalytic therapy and the science of psychoanalytic psychology is responsive here.
Regarding interpretation, Rudnytsky writes “there is no more fundamental principle than that the study of literature should be entirely text-based and forgo biography altogether” (p. 240). But Gerald Edelman (1992) warns that “ignoring the origin of things is always a risky matter” (p. 33); he insists, Rudnytsky quotes him, that “the phenomena of psychology depend on the species in which they are seen, and the properties of the species depend on natural selection” (p. 241). Paraphrasing Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection, he touches on Edelman’s application of the concept of intentionality, originally introduced by Franz Brentano, one of Freud’s teachers in Vienna, who saw that “beings with minds can refer to other beings or things; [whereas] things without minds do not refer to beings or other things” (p. 243). Edelman also offers the notion of qualia, a philosophical term for everything “personal or subjective” that can be “experienced directly only by a single observer” (quoted by Rudnytsky, p.114). Freud himself struggled with the problem of quality in the 1895 Project (p. 307).
“Edelman’s proposal of a ‘single, evolutionarily based theory . . . dovetails with E. O. Wilson’s grand design in Consilience’”; Rudnytsky sees this as providing “an intellectual context for contemporary psychoanalysis” (p. 245; see Wilson 1998). While Edelman finds that Freud’s “basic theses about the action of the unconscious are essentially correct . . .” (p. 247), “Wilson’s dream of consilience . . . falls short in practice because of its one-sided tilt toward the sciences . . .” (p. 251). In an ironic twist, Rudnytsky proceeds from here to a substantial review of J. Allan Hobson’s theorizing and research on dreaming, particularly in REM sleep, which he finds “both necessary and sufficient for dreaming to occur” (p. 265; see Hobson 1988). On grounds of the pathways involved, Mark Solms emphasizes the “radical hypothesis . . . to the effect that dreams are motivated phenomena, driven by our wishes” (p. 265).
In a different context, Rudnytsky examines Oliver Sacks’s return to Freud’s notion of a “dependent concomitant”: “The psychic is . . . a process parallel to the physiological” (Freud 1891; see Sacks 1998). And he sees Freud as someone “whose key ideas have been borne out by subsequent researchers” (p. 267). Morton Reiser thinks similarly of an “intermediate conceptual template . . . isomorphic with both the biological and psychological realms which are not themselves isomorphic with each other” (p. 269; see Reiser 1984). Rudnytsky finds further support in Eric Kandel’s having shown that early deprivations, whether neurological or of learning, have similar effects (p. 271; see Kandel 1979). Rudnytsky concludes that “psychotherapy, too, must ultimately work, in Kandel’s view,” by acting on brain functions, not on single synapses, but on synapses nevertheless . . . and that it is only insofar as our words produce changes in each other’s brains that psychotherapeutic intervention produces changes in patients’ minds’” (p. 273).
Rudnytsky credits Modell with recognizing that Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit (deferred action) gains support from Edelman’s theory that “past experiences are not recorded in the brain in a fashion that is isomorphic with these events . . .” (p. 277; see Modell 1990); “the aim of analytic therapy is to turn . . . deferred action into transference” (p. 279). Rudnytsky himself finds further support for his elaboration of Consilience in Carlo Strenger, for whom deferred action “is precisely the principle of typological exegesis employed by Christians in the middle ages to describe how everything contained in the Old Testament foreshadowed the incarnation of Christ set forth in the New Testament . . .” (p. 283; see Strenger 1991). “Exactly the same relation obtains between classical and Christian culture, as personified with the characters of Vergil and Beatrice . . . ascending the Mount of Purgatory” (p. 284). Rudnytsky reflects a bit more on this charming allegory and concludes the book convinced that “we can ultimately fulfill Freud’s dream and enlarge it with our own dream for the theoretical structure of the discipline and the science of psychoanalysis” (p. 284). Thus the air is cleared, and reconciliation and redemption prevail. The scope of Rudnytsky’s book is wide; its arguments are carried by a passion that at times rises to an almost missionary zeal to promote the relational model for the benefit of science and humanity. Despite this reservation, however, Reading Psychoanalysis is a groundbreaking text that has much of importance to teach us of our past and present.