Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Pierre Janet may also be regarded as a ‘pre-Freudian’. Part of a great generation of French scholars which included Henri Bergson, Émile Durkheim, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Alfred Binet, Janet’s first important work was Psychological Automatism

, which included the results of experiments he carried out at Le Havre between 1882 and 1888. There, he claimed to have refined a technique of hypnosis in which he induced his patients to undertake automatic writing. These writings, he said, explained why his patients would develop ‘terror’ fits without any apparent reason.²³

Janet also noticed that, under hypnosis, patients sometimes developed a dual personality. One side was created to please the physician while the second, which would occur spontaneously, was best explained as a ‘return to childhood’. (Patients would refer to themselves, all of a sudden, by their childhood nicknames.) When Janet moved to Paris he developed his technique known as ‘Psychological Analysis’. This was a repeated use of hypnosis and automatic writing, during the course of which, he noticed, the crises that were induced were followed by the patient’s mind becoming clearer. However, the crises became progressively more severe and the ideas that emerged showed that they were reaching back in time, earlier and earlier in the patient’s life. Janet concluded that ‘in the human mind, nothing ever gets lost’ and that ‘subconscious fixed ideas are both the result of mental weakness and [a] source of further and worse mental weakness’.²⁴

The nineteenth century was also facing up to the issue of child sexuality. Physicians had traditionally considered it a rare abnormality but, as early as 1846, Father P. J. C. Debreyne, a moral theologian who was also a physician, published a tract where he insisted on the high frequency of infantile masturbation, of sexual play between young children, and of the seduction of very young children by wet nurses and servants. Bishop Dupanloup of Orléans was another churchman who repeatedly emphasised the frequency of sexual play among children, arguing that most of them acquired ‘bad habits’ between the ages of one and two years. Most famously, Jules Michelet, in Our Sons

(1869), warned parents about the reality of child sexuality and in particular what today would be called the Oedipus complex.²⁵

Two things of some importance emerge from even this brief survey of nineteenth-century (mainly German and French) thought. The first is to dispense thoroughly with any idea that Freud ‘discovered’ the unconscious. Whether or not the unconscious exists as an entity (an issue we shall return to later), the idea of the unconscious predates Freud by several decades and was common currency in European thought throughout most of the 1800s. Second, many of the other psychological concepts inextricably linked with Freud in the minds of so many – such ideas as childhood sexuality, the Oedipus complex, repression, regression, transference, the libido, the id and the superego – were also not original to Freud. They were as much ‘in the air’ as the unconscious was, as much as ‘evolution’ was at the time Darwin conceived the mechanism of natural selection. Freud had nowhere near as original a mind as he is generally given credit for.

Surprising as all this is, for many people, it is still not the main charge against him, not the main sin so far as Freud’s critics contend. These critics, such figures as Frederick Crews, Frank Cioffi, Allen Esterson, Malcolm Macmillan and Frank Sulloway (the list is long and growing), further argue that Freud is – not to beat about the bush – a charlatan, a ‘scientist’ only in quotation marks, who fudged and faked his data and deceived both himself and others. And this, the critics charge, completely vitiates his theories and the conclusions based on them.

The best format to convey the new view of Freud is first to give the orthodox view of the ways in which he conceived his theories, and their reception, and then to give the main charges against him, showing how the orthodox view now has to be altered (this alteration, it should be said one more time, is drastic – we are talking here about critical scholarship over the last forty years but, in the main, the last fifteen years). Here, to begin with, is the orthodox version.