Nov 9, 2021
Joel Whitebook (Columbia)
Freud: An intellectual biography
The life and work of Sigmund Freud continue to fascinate general and professional readers alike. Joel Whitebook here presents the first major biography of Freud since the last century, taking into account recent developments in psychoanalytic theory and practice, gender studies, philosophy, cultural theory, and more. Offering a radically new portrait of the creator of psychoanalysis, this book explores the man in all his complexity alongside an interpretation of his theories that cuts through the stereotypes that surround him. The development of Freud's thinking is addressed not only in the context of his personal life, but also in that of society and culture at large, while the impact of his thinking on subsequent issues of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and social theory is fully examined. Whitebook demonstrates that declarations of Freud's obsolescence are premature, and, with his clear and engaging style, brings this vivid figure to life in compelling and readable fashion.
About the author
Joel Whitebook is a philosopher and psychoanalyst who was born in Los Angeles in 1947 and raised in a secular and liberal Jewish family. Joel attended the University of California at Berkeley in the late sixties where he majored in philosophy. The Berkeley experience was decisive in shaping his future career in two ways. After he joined the New Left and became more political in his outlook, the brand of analytic philosophy he was being exposed to in the university’s department increasingly appeared too restricted to him. And while he was a student and activist at Berkeley, Joel discovered the tradition of the Frankfurt School, largely through the work of Herbert Marcuse.
Seeking a different approach to the field, Joel became a doctoral student in the philosophy department of The New School For Social Research, where he had the good fortune to study not only with Hannah Arendt, Aron Gurwitsch and Hans Jonas, but also with Albrecht Wellmer, a representative of the second generation of the Frankfurt School. Through his work with Wellmer, Joel’s involvement with Critical Theory and the other thinkers of that tradition deepened significantly. He became particularly interested in the Frankfurt School’s attempt to integrate psychoanalysis into critical social theory. In fact, he adopted that project as his own and has pursued it throughout his career.
After receiving his Ph.D. from the New School in philosophy in 1977, Joel decided to become a practicing psychoanalyst. To this end, he took a second doctorate in clinical psychology at CUNY and received his psychoanalytic training at The New York Freudian Society. Joel hung out his shingle in 1985, and for the next twenty-five years combined a life of private practice and teaching, first at New School, then at Columbia, as well as in a number of clinical settings. He is currently on the faculty of Columbia’s Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and is the Director of its Psychoanalytic Studies Program.
In his book Perversion and Utopia and in numerous articles, Joel has sought to continue the Frankfurt School’s attempt to integrate psychoanalysis and Critical Theory in a particular way. Following the lead of Hans Loewald and Cornelius Castoriadis, he has examined the major developments in psychoanalysis since the middle of the last century — often grouped under the notion of “the preoedipal turn” — and attempted to work out their consequences for contemporary psychoanalysis and Critical Theory. He has also used preoedipal theory to explore the problem of “the missing mother” in his recent intellectual biography of Freud.
That he was a member of Slate's discussion group on the Sopranos is one of Joel's proudest credentials. During the second and third seasons of the show, he participated in a weekly roundtable discussion of Tony’s relationship with Dr. Melfi along with three psychoanalytic colleagues.
Review
'This is a
brilliant book that combines psychoanalytic thinking and
intellectual history to demonstrate that Freud remains central to
current debates not only in psychoanalysis, but also in cultural
theory, philosophy and gender studies. With his expertise in
psychoanalytic theory, Joel Whitebook elucidates the development of
Freud’s thinking and presents a radically new way of reading him.
He appropriates insights from feminism, pre-Oedipal theory, and
clinical experience with non-neurotic patients to transform our
picture of the founder of the field. When one focuses on early
development, the maternal presence and the repudiation of
femininity, Freud no longer appears as another dead white male, but
as a vital thinker whose ideas have important consequences for the
contemporary world.' Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, Director of the
Columbia University Psychoanalytic Center’s Parent-Infant Program,
and member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and of the
Société Psychanalytique de Paris
'Whitebook has written a distinctive kind of intellectual biography, with a rich and complex agenda, which is far from reproducing those already available. He offers a perspective on Freud that incorporates new developments in psychoanalytic thinking and integrates psychoanalysis with broader philosophical trajectories. The result is outstanding: a biography with intellectual force that captivates its reader.' Sebastian Gardner, University College London
'Despite all attempts to bury him, Freud remains the ultimate revenant, haunting the twenty-first century at a time when all the best efforts to outgrow our self-incurred immaturity have come to naught. Drawing on his sustained experience as a practicing psychoanalyst and deep immersion in contemporary theory, Joel Whitebook shows how relevant many of Freud’s ideas remain. By linking critical elements of Freud's thought with crucial aspects of his life - his vexed relationship with his mother, troubled friendships with Fliess and Jung, ambivalent response to war, and ruminations on mortality - he offers a fresh and insightful reading, neither excessively pious nor reductively dismissive, of a thinker we are only beginning to understand and from whom much is still to be learned.' Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley
'With the clinical acumen of an analyst and the intellectual rigor of a philosopher, Joel Whitebook gives us a Freud for our disenchanted but perhaps a bit wiser times. Never minimizing the greatness of the thinker or the magnitude of his achievement, Whitebook makes extensive and judicious use of the recent scholarly critiques of the man and his work, as well as of the expanded scope of psychoanalysis that has deepened, augmented, and where necessary corrected Freud’s own inaugural discoveries and formulations, pursuing his inquiry with Freud’s own ideal of the relentless pursuit of the truth. In the resulting brilliant study of the intertwining of the life and the work, we recognize a very human Freud with outsized gifts and equally outsized flaws and limitations, neither idealized nor condemned for his very real but comprehensible weaknesses and blind spots, but understood in the light of analytic neutrality in the best sense.' Robert Paul, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Studies, Emory University, Atlanta
'The distinguished psychoanalytic scholar and analyst Joel Whitebook’s lively new intellectual biography of Freud gives us a strikingly plausible view of its subject. With special attention to Freud’s tangled family circumstances in childhood, Whitebook evokes a figure of the 'dark enlightenment,' committed to the ideal of scientific inquiry yet fully aware of the irrationalities, even the pre-oedipal ones, to which the enquiring mind is subject. Whitebook reads this attitude in relation to Freud’s personal and professional 'break with tradition.' He also engages with the feminist critique of Freud by pursuing the theme of 'the missing mother,' the absence of women as protagonists in any of Freud’s key dramas being, in his view, a submerged but haunting presence occasioned by the disappearance or 'psychological death' of his earliest caregivers. This book is well worth promoting to the top of the queue on anyone’s Freud reading list.' Paul Fry, William Lampson Professor of English, Yale University
'Joel Whitebook presents to us an extraordinary new biography of Freud. In contrast to the classical biographies he is in a position to use our current psychoanalytic knowledge on the early development of the child and the early mother-child relationship to show the development of Freud’s personality and his theoretical work in a new light. The missing of the maternal dimension in the unfolding of his ideas was one of the most important consequences of Freud’s early traumatic experiences for his thinking. With his profound psychoanalytic and philosophical knowledge, great empathy and integrative strength Whitebook brilliantly describes the central motifs, the creative ways and also the wrong tracks in the development of Freud’s theoretical thinking, confronting it with critical issues in contemporary psychoanalysis and philosophy … His book is a masterpiece.' Werner Bohleber, author of Destructiveness, Intersubjectivity, and Trauma: The Identity Crisis of Modern Psychoanalysis and editor of Psyche
'Whitebook is fascinating on the historical theme of 'the break with tradition' both in 19th century intellectual life and in Jewish history.' Jane O'Grady, Daily Telegraph
'An elegant foray into the man and his mind … rich and illuminating.' Lisa Appignanesi, The Guardian
'At almost 500 pages and supported with extensive footnotes, the book is a treasure trove for readers who want to better understand one of the most significant and prolific minds of the last 150 years.' Mike Phelps, Simply Charly (www.simplycharly.com)
'… it should be mandatory reading for graduate students in the field of psychiatry.' C. D. Quyn, San Francisco Book Review (www.sanfranciscobookreview.com)
'… strongly argued, well-informed … a sensitive account.' Stephen Frosh, Jewish Chronicle
'The book is a readable, enjoyable and well-documented biography of Freud that summarizes current scholarship, and makes good use of recently published archival materials.' Metapsychology
'This book is more than merely a descriptive path through Freud’s life. More accurately, it is a case study of Freud’s life using the ideas that Freud pioneered. Many sources are traditional and historical, but Whitebook also expertly incorporates recent publications in the area of Freud studies - whose emergence shows no sign of abating.' Choice
'Professor Whitebook is an insightful scholar and a remarkably readable writer and he has skillfully steered his way between the hagiographers and the ‘Freud bashers'. He always has an eye for the telling detail.' The Quarterly Review
''Does the world need another biography of Sigmund Freud?’ Perhaps no longer, for Whitebook has covered an extraordinary amount of territory. What one is left with upon closing the covers of this 'intellectual biography', it should be further noted, is something more than an identification of the sociocultural milieu in question, something more than a drawing out of the interrelation of the life and work of the subject, and something more than a comprehensive investigation into the historical implications of each: one is left, whether or not it was the author’s intention, with an ever deepening sense of compassion for one of the greatest thinkers, founders even, of the modern era.' Lois Oppenheim, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
'Whitebook has written a distinctive kind of intellectual biography, with a rich and complex agenda, which is far from reproducing those already available. He offers a perspective on Freud that incorporates new developments in psychoanalytic thinking and integrates psychoanalysis with broader philosophical trajectories. The result is outstanding: a biography with intellectual force that captivates its reader.' Sebastian Gardner, University College London
'Despite all attempts to bury him, Freud remains the ultimate revenant, haunting the twenty-first century at a time when all the best efforts to outgrow our self-incurred immaturity have come to naught. Drawing on his sustained experience as a practicing psychoanalyst and deep immersion in contemporary theory, Joel Whitebook shows how relevant many of Freud’s ideas remain. By linking critical elements of Freud's thought with crucial aspects of his life - his vexed relationship with his mother, troubled friendships with Fliess and Jung, ambivalent response to war, and ruminations on mortality - he offers a fresh and insightful reading, neither excessively pious nor reductively dismissive, of a thinker we are only beginning to understand and from whom much is still to be learned.' Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley
'With the clinical acumen of an analyst and the intellectual rigor of a philosopher, Joel Whitebook gives us a Freud for our disenchanted but perhaps a bit wiser times. Never minimizing the greatness of the thinker or the magnitude of his achievement, Whitebook makes extensive and judicious use of the recent scholarly critiques of the man and his work, as well as of the expanded scope of psychoanalysis that has deepened, augmented, and where necessary corrected Freud’s own inaugural discoveries and formulations, pursuing his inquiry with Freud’s own ideal of the relentless pursuit of the truth. In the resulting brilliant study of the intertwining of the life and the work, we recognize a very human Freud with outsized gifts and equally outsized flaws and limitations, neither idealized nor condemned for his very real but comprehensible weaknesses and blind spots, but understood in the light of analytic neutrality in the best sense.' Robert Paul, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Studies, Emory University, Atlanta
'The distinguished psychoanalytic scholar and analyst Joel Whitebook’s lively new intellectual biography of Freud gives us a strikingly plausible view of its subject. With special attention to Freud’s tangled family circumstances in childhood, Whitebook evokes a figure of the 'dark enlightenment,' committed to the ideal of scientific inquiry yet fully aware of the irrationalities, even the pre-oedipal ones, to which the enquiring mind is subject. Whitebook reads this attitude in relation to Freud’s personal and professional 'break with tradition.' He also engages with the feminist critique of Freud by pursuing the theme of 'the missing mother,' the absence of women as protagonists in any of Freud’s key dramas being, in his view, a submerged but haunting presence occasioned by the disappearance or 'psychological death' of his earliest caregivers. This book is well worth promoting to the top of the queue on anyone’s Freud reading list.' Paul Fry, William Lampson Professor of English, Yale University
'Joel Whitebook presents to us an extraordinary new biography of Freud. In contrast to the classical biographies he is in a position to use our current psychoanalytic knowledge on the early development of the child and the early mother-child relationship to show the development of Freud’s personality and his theoretical work in a new light. The missing of the maternal dimension in the unfolding of his ideas was one of the most important consequences of Freud’s early traumatic experiences for his thinking. With his profound psychoanalytic and philosophical knowledge, great empathy and integrative strength Whitebook brilliantly describes the central motifs, the creative ways and also the wrong tracks in the development of Freud’s theoretical thinking, confronting it with critical issues in contemporary psychoanalysis and philosophy … His book is a masterpiece.' Werner Bohleber, author of Destructiveness, Intersubjectivity, and Trauma: The Identity Crisis of Modern Psychoanalysis and editor of Psyche
'Whitebook is fascinating on the historical theme of 'the break with tradition' both in 19th century intellectual life and in Jewish history.' Jane O'Grady, Daily Telegraph
'An elegant foray into the man and his mind … rich and illuminating.' Lisa Appignanesi, The Guardian
'At almost 500 pages and supported with extensive footnotes, the book is a treasure trove for readers who want to better understand one of the most significant and prolific minds of the last 150 years.' Mike Phelps, Simply Charly (www.simplycharly.com)
'… it should be mandatory reading for graduate students in the field of psychiatry.' C. D. Quyn, San Francisco Book Review (www.sanfranciscobookreview.com)
'… strongly argued, well-informed … a sensitive account.' Stephen Frosh, Jewish Chronicle
'The book is a readable, enjoyable and well-documented biography of Freud that summarizes current scholarship, and makes good use of recently published archival materials.' Metapsychology
'This book is more than merely a descriptive path through Freud’s life. More accurately, it is a case study of Freud’s life using the ideas that Freud pioneered. Many sources are traditional and historical, but Whitebook also expertly incorporates recent publications in the area of Freud studies - whose emergence shows no sign of abating.' Choice
'Professor Whitebook is an insightful scholar and a remarkably readable writer and he has skillfully steered his way between the hagiographers and the ‘Freud bashers'. He always has an eye for the telling detail.' The Quarterly Review
''Does the world need another biography of Sigmund Freud?’ Perhaps no longer, for Whitebook has covered an extraordinary amount of territory. What one is left with upon closing the covers of this 'intellectual biography', it should be further noted, is something more than an identification of the sociocultural milieu in question, something more than a drawing out of the interrelation of the life and work of the subject, and something more than a comprehensive investigation into the historical implications of each: one is left, whether or not it was the author’s intention, with an ever deepening sense of compassion for one of the greatest thinkers, founders even, of the modern era.' Lois Oppenheim, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association
Book Description
This book
presents a radical look at the founder of psychoanalysis in his
broader cultural context, addressing critical issues and
challenging stereotypes.
Podcast transcript
August Baker:
Welcome to New Books in Psychoanalysis. I'm August Baker.
We're talking today with Dr. Joel Whitebook about his book Freud:
An Intellectual Biography. Dr. Whitebook is a philosopher and
psychoanalyst who maintained a private practice for 25 years and is
on the faculty at Columbia University. Welcome, Dr. Whitebook.
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
It's a pleasure to be here.
August Baker:
Thank you. I wanted to know to start if there's some more
you'd like to say to the listeners about your background, your
intellectual orientation, your influences and mentors, things like
that that might be helpful for people approaching the book?
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
Yes, I think that would be a good idea. My general background
has been in critical theory in the tradition of the Frankfurt
School. I started out as a philosopher and then, after completing a
doctorate in philosophy, became a psychoanalyst. But the type of
philosophy that I was oriented towards, or the school that I was
trained in, which as I mentioned was a Frankfurt School, was one of
the first, if not the first, group of philosophers and social
scientists in Europe to take Freud seriously, to teach him at the
university.
In fact, they even promoted his receiving the Goethe Prize in
Frankfurt, and he was a pillar of their project along with Marx and
Hegel and Max Weber. They attempted to formulate a critical theory
of modernity by integrating these four major figures. So a main
element of their project was the integration of psychoanalysis into
a critical theory of society, or you might say a critical theory of
modernity. And that's the project which I have tried to pursue and
continue to pursue. You could describe my work in recent years as
an attempt to update what earlier critical theorists in the
Frankfurt School tradition have done in terms of psychoanalysis and
critical theory by bringing more recent developments in
psychoanalysis to bear on critical theory.
August Baker:
I see. Okay. That's very interesting. And what were the four
figures? You said Freud, Marx, and who were the other two?
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
I would say Marx, Hegel, Freud, and Max Weber.
August Baker:
Okay. And I wanted to note also that you say in the beginning
of your book that your aim is not here to provide a comprehensive
biography. There are many of those. And you say you want to provide
a narrative of the relation between Freud's life and his work,
which is a very psychoanalytic thing to do, and you want to try to
do it without being reductive. And you say you want to do it from
the perspective of two particular themes. Could you tell the
listeners about those two themes?
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
Yes. When I was asked to do the book by Cambridge University
Press, it was specifically to be an intellectual biography, which
meant that my task was to interpret the development of Freud's
thinking against the backdrop of what was going on in his life and
in the general culture. So when I say it's not a general biography,
what I meant by that more specifically was that it was an
intellectual biography. And the two themes which organize my
narrative are what I've called the Break With Tradition, which
tries to locate Freud in the historical developments of his day and
in terms of the theorist who are trying to understand those
developments, and then also the second theme was what I call the
Missing Mother, which has to do with the fact that the theme of the
mother is sorely underdeveloped in Freud's thinking.
August Baker:
Okay, that's very helpful. As I read the book, which I really
enjoyed, I was thinking, you're looking at his life and his work,
and it's not just here's his early childhood and here's his
theories. You're also looking at his love life, you might say, his
passions and his battle with illness. So you're kind of
intertwining his theories and his logic, his theories in his life
throughout his life. Is that accurate?
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
Yes, and I'd specify it even more. There are two schools of
thought when it comes to relating a person's life to their work.
One school of thought is what you might call the content, for lack
of a better work, and that says that a person's biography shouldn't
be taken into consideration in appreciating their work or in
evaluating or interpreting their work but that the work should
stand in its own right and be approached in its own terms. In other
words, you shouldn't try and understand a Mozart symphony or opera
in terms of what we know about Mozart's life. And that goes for any
great thinker.
And the worry there is reductionism. They want to guard
against having a person's work reduced to its genesis and the
person's life history. And it often turns into a sort of gossip
where you try and uncover the dirty window in a person's life as a
way of reducing their work. Now, that's a valid concern, but they
go too far in the other extreme and just want to consider the work
in its own right without any consideration of its genesis and the
development of the person's life. The other issue-
August Baker:
Ah, could-
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
Yeah, go ahead.
August Baker:
No, that's a good point because you are talking about new
developments in psychoanalytic theory throughout the book.
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
I'll come to that after I make one more point. The other pole,
which as I've already indicated, is reductionism, which you found
in earlier forms of either vulgar Marxism or vulgar Freudianism, or
now you might even say neuroscience, which tries to reduce a
person's accomplishments to debunk them in a way by reducing them
to some lower level explanation. In vulgar Freudian terms, it would
be in terms of their psychosexual life. In vulgar Marxist terms, it
would be in terms of their economic situation. And today, you might
say in neuropsychological terms, it would be reducing them to their
brain chemistry. So, that's the other pole that has... It's the
Scylla and the Charybdis, and that's the Charybdis as opposed to
the Kantian Scylla, which has to be avoided.
Now, the third position, which I would say is the truly
psychoanalytic position and one which Freud himself advocated, is
trying to understand the relationship between what is called
genesis and validity, how certain things, accomplishments arose out
of the conditions of a person's biography but somehow achieve an
objective validity of their own, which while being related to those
circumstances isn't reducible to them. Of course, he postulated the
idea of sublimation as a marker to explain this process whereby
genetic material gets turned into valid cultural objects, you might
say.
August Baker:
Right. I keep thinking about this quotation that you have
here. Maybe this is related. You talk about Freud coming to
understand the human mind as naturally oriented toward the external
world and resisting an attempt to redirect its gaze inward. And you
have a quote that he wrote to Albert Einstein. "All our attention
is directed to the outside, whence dangers and satisfaction beckon.
From the inside, we want only to be left in peace. So if someone
tries to turn our awareness inward, then our whole organization
resists, just as, for example, the esophagus and the urethra resist
any attempt to reverse their normal direction of passage." And you
say this observation helps us understand the widespread hostility
towards psychoanalysis.
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
Yeah, I make several points. First of all, one way I would
say, a very interesting way, or actually the way that I would put
it, and I take this largely from somebody who deeply influenced me
and whom I draw on and mention in the book but who's not that
well-known in this country, namely a Greek philosopher and
psychoanalyst who lived in Paris for many years named Cornelius
Castoriadis, and Castoriadis argued that Freud's project or what we
should take from Freud's project is the attempt to understand the
relationship between psychic reality and social reality, between
the inner world and the social world. And of course, one could
argue that Freud's great discovery in the interpretation of the
dreams was psychic reality, that we are citizens of two worlds, we
live in the world of a psychic reality and we live in the world of
social reality, and that the real interesting question and the goal
is to try and understand the relationship between the two.
The next point is there are many explanations for why there is
such a resistance, indeed a hostility, towards psychoanalysis,
going back to the fact that Freud argued or discovered, you might
say, infantile sexuality, or that he said that we have innate
aggressive drives, which seems to contradict the conventional
picture of human beings as being essentially good and sociable, or
even going further, that we have a death instinct. I mean, all
these help to explain or are good reasons for accounting for the
hostility or resistances, analysts say, to psychoanalysis. But in
the quote that you read, that points to another resistance which I
think is equally powerful and which is only being appreciated more
in recent years, which is people's resistance to psychic reality,
resistance to the fact that we are determined to a large extent by
inner events which we don't have great control over, or as Freud
put it, "The ego is not master in his own house."
And one of the difficulties in clinical work and helping
somebody to get involved in a psychoanalytic process is helping
them to accept the fact that there is this powerful psychic reality
and that one is better off dealing with it than leaving it alone. I
mean, all too often patients, people in treatment would much rather
attribute their problems to the external world, to society, to
their spouses, to their bosses, what have you. For some reason, it
seems to be a fact that it's easier to attribute things to the
external world than to look within.
And one final point, I think today, when we live in a world
where we are constantly distracted by screens, everywhere you go,
you to your doctor's office, there's a television, you go to the
train stations, there are televisions, even now when you go to a
gas station, they have these little screens while you're filling
your tank, and all I have to is walk down the street and
everybody's got their nose buried in a phone, and today we are
bombarded by so much external stimuli that it makes the task of
turning inward even that much more difficult. There are innumerable
reasons for the decline of psychoanalysis in today's culture, but I
would say this is perhaps a more recent one but one of the very
powerful ones.
August Baker:
That's a very powerful point. Maybe could you give a quick
overview of Frankfurt School? Because when I hear you saying that
we're going to be combining Freud and Marx, I'm thinking of that as
Freud being more the internal and Marx more the external.
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
Well, one way to understand that, I mean, they were a group of
German Jewish philosophers and social scientists who started out in
the '20s but really consolidated in the '30s at the Institute for
Social Research in Frankfurt. And while they were generally Marxist
in their orientation, they were never dogmatic and they were always
anti-Stalinists. But when in the '30s, one had an economic crisis,
the Great Depression, which according to Marxist predictions should
have produced a socialist revolution, it in fact produced just the
opposite, namely a large part of the European working class was
turning to fascism. And this was a anomaly, to put it mildly, that
any Marxist had to confront. And methodologically, the critical
theorist in the Frankfurt School concluded that the problem was
that Marxism didn't study the subjective dimension. In other words,
consciousness, subjectivity was basically reduced to material
conditions.
So in order to explain the fact that the working class hadn't
fulfilled this historical mission but on the contrary had done just
the opposite they concluded, A, that Marxian theory had to be
augmented by psychology and that Freudian depth psychology was the
best to do it, and that they could deploy Freudian categories to
try and explain why this had occurred. And under the directorship
of Max Horkheimer, they produced a series of volumes called
Authority and the Family, which tried to explain the makeup of the
German working class in terms of their peculiar family relations
and how this gave rise to an authoritarian character or
sensibility.
August Baker:
Oh, that's helpful. Thank you. And then, as I understand, your
project would be to take some of the more recent developments in
psychoanalysis and build them in. And as I understand it, much of
that is under the label of pre-Oedipal as opposed to Oedipal, or
what you call the Missing Mother. Is that correct?
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
Yes. One could argue that the most significant development
after Freud's death, which, as they say in psychoanalysis, is the
second world, is the so-called pre-Oedipal term, which is the turn
towards understanding the first three years of life and the infant
child relationship. I mean, my thesis in the book is that Freud was
basically a theorist of what he called the father complex. When you
read his case studies one after another, it's always a polemic for
the importance of the father complex, the Oedipus complex. He
referred to the Oedipus complex as the "nuclear complex of the
neurosis." He, in his cultural writings, most notably in Totem and
Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, he explained the origins of
religion in terms of the Oedipus complex.
So when the Frankfurt School, not only the Frankfurt School
but most psychoanalytically oriented social theorists prior to the
'60s, say, and there are a few exceptions, adopted Freudian theory
to explain social phenomena, they basically employed his Oedipal
theory, his theory of the father complex. So that after the Second
World War, and we could discuss the reasons for this, there was an
intense interest in the early mother infant relationship developed.
And a number of the most important psychoanalysts after the war,
and I would say Donald Winnicott is the most important here,
started exploring the first three years of life, the early
separation-individuation process. Then that was followed by infant
research and attachment theory. So the great augmentation of
psychoanalytic theory has been the addition of pre-Oedipal theory
to Oedipal theory. So when I am trying to expand and continue the
project of the Frankfurt School, which as I said is to try and
integrate critical theory and psychoanalysis, what I have tried to
do is to examine how we would rethink some of the central problems
using pre-Oedipal rather than Oedipal theory.
August Baker:
Interesting. That makes it very clear. And I guess to help
understand it, could you help explain how treatment and
psychoanalytic treatment proceeds for a classical patient, one that
is seen as an Oedipus complex versus a unclassical one with
pre-Oedipal issues?
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
Perhaps Winnicott put it best. He said Freud basically not
ignored but radically didn't pay sufficient attention to the first
three years of life. That is the years of life when
separation-individuation takes place until what's called a unit
self is formed, the consolidation of self, which takes place in the
third or fourth year. So, Freud assumed the existence of the unit
self, which had an interior structure, which he said was made up of
the id, ego, and super-ego, and that this person interacted with
other unit selves and suffered from what were called intrapsychic
conflicts, that is conflicts that occurred within a self that was
already unified and formed. And his approach to psychoanalysis, his
clinical technique, his understanding of the psychoanalytic setting
was all predicated on the idea that he was a unit self and he was
dealing with other unit selves and that the analysis involved the
interaction between these unit selves.
What this meant in practice was that, I mean, and this is how
he described what was referred to as the classical patient or the
good neurotic, and in practice, what this meant was that these
people were basically able to make use of the psychoanalytic setup,
or what's called the psychoanalytic frame, and be able to abide by
the structure of psychoanalysis and come so many times a week and
free associate and accept interpretations and would be helped in
terms of interpretation. Now, whether or not this classical patient
ever existed is a disputed issue, but we won't get into that. One
of the things that led to the pre-Oedipal turn after the war, and
this was especially true in London, but also in the States, that
analysts were seeing more and more patients couldn't be reached
with a classical method. Not only couldn't be helped by it, but
often couldn't be reached by it. They, you might say, couldn't
accept the rules of the game that were necessary to involve oneself
in psychoanalysis.
So in order to understand this, the new patient, the
post-classical patient, the non-neurotic patient, however you want
to call it, analysts began examining pathology, which stems from
the earlier phases of life, relationship to the early mother, the
separation-individuation process, as I said, the formation of a
stable unit self, which meant that those issues themselves became
the topic of psychoanalytic interventions, were called pathologies
of the self. And in addition to, or before, I mean, there's
difference of opinions about this and it varies from case to case,
before dealing with Oedipal issues having to do with later stages
of development, it's necessary to address issues with a patient
that stem from these early forms of what's self-pathology or what's
sometimes referred to as narcissistic pathology.
August Baker:
I thought this probably relates. You say, "When these people,"
meaning unclassical patients, "are able to articulate their
experience, they provide us," and you're referring to Loewald,
"Loewald maintains, 'With insight into the psychotic core of the
personality, which is rarely accessible in higher functioning
individuals, though it is present in all of us.'" Maybe that's what
you meant by whether there ever was a classical patient. Could you
speak to this psychotic core?
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
Well, I mean, this is also somewhat a matter of contention,
but if you assume as I do, and as Loewald does, by the way, he's, I
would say, one of the most important theorists after Freud, and one
who has influenced me enormously, that we begin life in some sort
of undifferentiated or symbiotic stage or a merger with the mother
and the development consists in moving away from, differentiating
oneself away from that originally undifferentiated stage, then,
well, if you take that line of analysis and you also believe that
earlier stages of development aren't just eradicated but somehow
stay active in the psyche, are somehow sedimented in psychic life,
then you can assume that residues of that undifferentiated stage,
what he calls a psychotic core, psychotic meaning because it's a
merged state, the psychotic core exist in all of us, just in
patients who are able to, for whatever developmental reasons,
achieve a higher degree of individuation and a more firmly
structured and stable self, that core is further buried.
But in patients, the post-classical patients I've been
mentioning, that stage remains less well buried and is more
accessible and is encountered more easily than it is... The
neurotic patient, the so-called high-functioning patient in some
way doesn't have access or it's more difficult for them to gain
access to the more archaic parts of the personality having to do
with this psychotic core. So that when we deal with the less
high-functioning patients, I want to use terms that are
non-judgmental here, non-stigmatizing, so that when we deal with
the less high-functioning patients, we often gain insight into
deeper levels of the psyche that aren't accessible with the higher
functioning patients, and as Loewald says, and Winnicott, well,
actually, he took this from Winnicott, believe they have a lot to
teach us about what Winnicott said, "What life is all about."
August Baker:
And Freud, of course, would be a very high-functioning patient
who may not have had so much access. Well, he didn't go through an
analysis either.
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
Received interpretation of Freud, which he himself
promulgated, and which analysts believed for many years, was that
he was a high-functioning, neurotic patient who hadn't suffered any
early traumas and that he was very well put together. But what
research into his early life in Freiberg by historians and by
academics and Freud studies has revealed in recent years, and this
is one of the points of departure of my narrative, is that in fact
his first three years in Freiberg and his relation to his mother
was really quite traumatic and that this presentation of himself as
this high-functioning, rational, well-integrated "normal" masculine
person was in many ways defensive.
And what he had done was actually split off and repress the
earlier stages in his own life and the psychic phenomena that are
attached to them because he had denied this part of himself.
Because he had dissociated himself from his earlier years and his
more primitive experience, he wasn't able to see it in his patients
and incorporate it in his theory. And that's why I have the thesis
of the Missing Mother. And part of what I attempted to do was to
trace the ramifications of this throughout the history of his
theory.
August Baker:
That's very helpful. Yes. And I think another bit of new
research is now the letters that Freud wrote to Wilhelm Fliess,
right? Those were-
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
Letters between both of them.
August Baker:
They were only available in 2011. So, that's another piece of
something that was hid that also you make a great use of here. We
don't have a lot of time, but do you want to talk about, I mean,
there's just so much to talk about, some of the early trauma that
has been revealed?
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
Well, before doing that, if we could do both, I'll try and be
quick. I mean, I'd like to say something about the Fliess
letters.
August Baker:
Yes.
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
The Freud establishment, which was made up of Heinz Hartmann
and Ernst Kris and Anna Freud, believe that in order to protect
Freud's reputation and the fragile reputation of psychoanalysis,
they had to suppress some of the more controversial material in his
life. So when the Fliess letters were first discovered in the '50s,
a very censored expurgated edition of them was brought out by Anna
Freud and Ernst Kris, and that was sort of the official view that
was followed until Anna Freud died in the '80s and Jeffrey Masson
brought out a complete un-expurgated version. And by the way, the
letters are fantastic. They are almost, I would say, a piece of
literature, and they offer you an unprecedented view into the inner
workings of a man's mind and his struggle to understand
himself.
And also, you see what a compassionate and thoroughly human
person he was. It's not just Freud, works and all, it's Freud in
all his humanity. And the Freud establishment in some way, one,
thought they had to deny his humanity. And my experience was in
reading them and seeing him in all his vulnerability, rather than
turning me off to him, it made me appreciate him much more. But
once you had the Fliess letters where he gave some hints about what
had actually gone on in his first three years in Freiberg, this led
to research into those years which uncovered how problematic and
traumatic his relationship to his mother had been.
August Baker:
Right. And of course, the Fliess letters also refer to...
There's some homosexual or homoerotic excitement there. You have
this quote where Freud is anticipating an upcoming Congress, and he
wrote to Fliess, "I bring nothing but two open ears and one
temporal lobe, lubricated for reception." I don't know if you've
read the biography of Kohut by Strozier, but the way the
psychoanalytic establishment frowned on homosexuality or needed to
distance itself from homosexuality is a big part of the story, at
least in the US.
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
Well, I think it's a big part of the story of the way the
Freud establishment tried to control the publication of these
things. I mean, I quote a feminist theorist, I think her name was
Garner, I don't remember, who said, when she first read the Fliess
letters, she said it occurred to her that these were love
letters.
August Baker:
Right.
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
And although we have no evidence that it was ever enacted and
completed sexually, he was passionately in love with this man. And
the homosexual love not just can't be denied, like the passage you
just quoted, I mean, it's there to be observed, as is the extent of
his cocaine usage. Jones said before, I think in the late 1880s,
but in fact it went on to 1896. So they felt like they had to bury
these facts in order to preserve his reputation. And in addition to
the pre-Oedipal turn in psychoanalysis, I think the fact that the
culture has become much more tolerant towards homosexuality and the
analytic world has made a valiant attempt to make amends for the
past and revise its views on homosexuality, it makes it much more
possible for us to view his homosexual dimension of his
relationship to Fliess, as well as to Jung, to view it in a much
more neutral way.
August Baker:
Right. I thought it was really convincing to me as an outline
of him, first Freud first falling in love at 16, and then, tell me,
and correct me if I'm wrong, being kind of overwhelmed by that,
turning to work, then falling in love with Martha, and then having
the passion of a love affair, which is separated by distance and
put into writing. And then once he gets married and Martha becomes
the mother at home, there's kind of like, well, where does all of
this energy go? And then Wilhelm Fliess was there, and it went
right there. Correct me if I'm wrong, that's the overview I got
from your book.
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
Yes. And there's one more point to it, that it's often been
said that Freud was an epistolary lover. He was separated from
Martha for six or seven years during their so-called betrothal,
their engagement. Martha's mother didn't particularly like Sigmund,
and she grabbed her daughter out of Vienna and dragged her to
Hamburg so she'd be away from him. So for the greater part of their
engagement, he didn't see her that much. And this love affair took
place to a large degree in his fantasy life, which was recorded in
these wonderful letters, all of which have been recently published.
So he was able to maintain this passionate and idealized love as
long as the real object wasn't there. And then when he finally had
to move in with her and see her doing the dishes, or I guess they
didn't do dishes-
August Baker:
Exactly.
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
... I guess they didn't do dishes in those days, or whatever,
it sort of collapsed, and then all of that passion was redirected
towards Fliess. But again, Fliess lived in Berlin. He didn't see
him that often, and he carried on largely an epistolary love affair
with Fliess.
August Baker:
Yeah, it's fascinating.
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
I mean, one of the hardest tasks for all of us, and one of the
tasks in most therapies and analyses is learning to give up our
idealized fantasies and our narcissistic self-protection and love a
real human being with all their flaws and who won't conform to our
wishes.
August Baker:
One point you talk about transference and you say that it's
often questioned what Freud's fundamental discovery was, and is it
the meaning of dreams, the existence of psychic reality, free
association, or even the psychoanalytic setup itself? The question
is impossible to answer. But you also talk about transference and
the way it's enacted both inside and outside of the psychoanalytic
setting, and that is a prime candidate for his fundamental
discovery. I wondered if you could talk about his relationship with
Wilhelm Fliess as a transference drama and as having both an
Oedipal and a pre-Oedipal level. I think you said in the
pre-Oedipal stratum Fliess was in the role of a breast mother that
he wanted to surrender to, and on the Oedipal level, Freud was in
what he considered a passive homosexual attitude.
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
Yeah. First of all, people tend to think of transference as
just one thing, but transferences assume many forms deriving from
all layers of psychic life and stages of development. And with
Fliess, I mean, I don't remember who it was, somebody observed...
Fliess actually became his doctor and started intervening on him,
operating on his nose and cauterizing it. We're not exactly sure
what he did, but he did operate on him. So I think we all know from
our experience as little children that one develops these powerful
transferences to their doctors. I mean, they're seen as these very
powerful figures, these authority figures, these magicians who
carry the magic of curing you. So the fact-
August Baker:
Especially surgeons.
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
Especially surgeons. Yeah. So the fact that Fliess became his
doctor meant that Fliess was open to all the transferences that are
associated with the figure of the father doctor, and which meant he
was an authority figure. He had all this magical knowledge. He
addresses one letter to him, "Dear Magician," and the sort of
passive homosexual mode. I mean, that's Freud's term for him. For
him, male homosexuality was the passive feminine role or the
passive homosexual role. I mean, as you said, as the surgeon, what
actually penetrated his body, Freud's homosexual desires to be
penetrated by him were activated. But in so far as he thought
Fliess as the medicine man, the witch doctor, the magician, the
shaman, contained all these magical powers, he was object of a
maternal transference where the fantasy is the mother has all this
wonderful warm milk that can alleviate all my discomfort and
suffering.
August Baker:
I guess that pre-Oedipal transference is the one that would be
more difficult for Freud to verbalize or to get at.
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, one of the last things Freud said, I mean,
this is the way I almost end the book, he says that there is a
limit to how far a man can go in psychoanalysis because to put
himself on the couch and put himself in a passive position to an
analyst, a male or female, men, because of their fear of their
passive homosexual female wishes can never allow themself to really
give themselves over to analysis. And he called this the biological
bedrock, which constituted the limit to how far an analysis could
go.
Now, my point is, because of his own discomfort with his own
passive feminine wishes, Freud couldn't explore them sufficiently.
So rather than saying, "This fear of passivity is bedrock," what he
should have done, and what we're trying to do today, is to analyze
that fear of passivity and to understand where it arises in male
development and partly in man's relationship to his separating from
his mother.
August Baker:
Right. It wasn't a biological bedrock, it was his own personal
bedrock, which may have been shared by a lot of other people and
can be related to all the trauma in his early childhood.
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
Right. By saying it's bedrock, what you do is you arrest
curiosity, you arrest exploration. It, like everything else, should
have been a topic for psychoanalytic exploration. He couldn't get
curious about his own rejection of the passive female position. He
couldn't get curious enough.
August Baker:
I understand that. There's so much I want cover, and we're
running out of time, but I wondered, another thing that you get
into is his illness and this terrible illness and the amount of
pain he went through and his confronting death, and I was really
taken by your description of his grandson's game, the Fort/Da game,
which I had never really seen the significance of, I wondered if
you could tell our listeners about that?
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
Well, he observed his grandson playing this game over and over
again where he would have a spool of yarn and throw it and then
retrieve it, and he would yell, "Fort," when he threw it. And then
when he'd pull it back in, he would say, "Da." So there, here. And
the boy had a very good relationship with his mother, and he
actually handled his separations from her very well and would play
this game when she was gone. And Freud, as well as his mother,
became very curious about the meaning of it. And what Freud came to
conclude or to hypothesize was that in this game, the child was
reenacting and overcoming the separation.
August Baker:
Symbolically.
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
So to Freud, the spool was a separation, and the bringing it
back in was mastering it. And this was the key to something that he
saw as a fundamental mechanism in psychic life and in culture. By
doing this, he was not just mastering it, but he was mastering it
by symbolizing it and acting it.
August Baker:
Yes. Freud calls his grandson's "great cultural
achievement."
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
Great cultural achievement. Because, I mean, one of the great
facts of the human condition that we all have to face, and one of
the great tasks is how we are going to deal with all of the
inevitable separations and losses that we have to experience in
life.
August Baker:
Right, right.
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
And Freud's answer is that the way we learn to deal with them
and the way we make them tolerable is through symbolic activity, by
symbolizing them. So, that's-
August Baker:
And play.
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
Yeah, play. Yeah. Winnicott went on to say by play. I mean,
there's intimate connection between symbol play and symbolization.
And by doing this, we not only learn to tolerate separation and
loss, but we also create meaning out of it. I mean, symbolizing
loss is the source of meaning for Freud.
August Baker:
Right. That's fascinating. That's just one nugget. There are
so many others. I wish I could talk to you about more, but we are
at the end of our 50 minute hour.
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
As we analysts say, "Time's up."
August Baker:
Which is terribly traumatic for a pre-Oedipal patient. But I
really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. I really
enjoyed the book. And thank you for appearing on New Books in
Psychoanalysis.
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
Yeah. I also want to thank you for asking very insightful
questions-
August Baker:
Oh, I appreciate that.
Dr. Joel Whitebook:
... and facilitating the discussion.
August Baker:
Thank you.