On Freud and Einstein's Correspondence

Lately people have been talking more of the rise and fall of Freud's psychotherapy and his philosophies. Some write him off completely because many of his psychoanalytical claims have been discounted through a more rigorous scientific method than Freud employed, but it's not good philosophy to discount an entire person for some incorrect claims. If we did that, we'd lose many of the old guys to misogyny or worse. We have to consider the merits of each idea. It doesn't matter if Freud is a genius or a hack; it matters if there's a seed of an interesting concept in anything he wrote. Others claim that he shouldn't be considered because he wasn't the first to write about many of the ideas he discusses, but if that's our criterion for our reading list, shouldn't we toss all those "footnotes to Plato"?

Frederick Crews just published a takedown of Freud's life and works, and he and Susie Orbach (a Freudian) debate Freud's merits in The Guardian. Orbach responds to some of Crews' criticism with this,

"Just as Newtonian physics has been superseded and Darwin was not the only person working on evolution, physicists and biologists don’t need to trash their predecessor in order to move the field along. The 1950s was a terrible time for psychoanalysis: it turned ideological and was used to send women back to the home after the social changes of the second world war. That’s why the infusion of 70s feminism was so critical to psychoanalysis’s reinvigoration and rethinking. Out of that has grown a more nuanced understanding of early attachment and how its impact is elaborated, of the complicated feelings and identities children have towards their parents, of the way in which mothers are not simply the failing objects of their children but are women struggling with their own legacies and subjectivity, of the fragility of masculinity....It always amuses and sometimes irritates me when other fields take up psychoanalysis, for they tend to freeze it and use concepts that practitioners have either jettisoned or contested."

Theories about human behaviour, both psychological and philosophical, firstly can't be evaluated out of historical context, and secondly, can't be expected to work for all times and places and circumstances. They will necessarily be mutated through the work of others as cultures shift. This is why we have to keep thinking. There isn't one right answer that we can all believe in forever; understanding our nature is a feat necessitating constant revisions. I agree with Orbach that people who dismiss Freud tend to take one or two main ideas that made way more sense back in the culture of 1890 Austria than they do in the here and now, and then laugh at the man who wrote them, largely ignoring the bulk or nuances of his work.

Louis Menand's excellent review of Crews' book in The New Yorker explores why Freud endures despite a rejection of more popular ideas.

"Studies suggesting that psychoanalysis had a low cure rate had been around for a while. But the realization that depression and anxiety can be regulated by medication made a mode of therapy whose treatment times reached into the hundreds of billable hours seem, at a minimum, inefficient, and, at worst, a scam....For many years, even as writers were discarding the more patently absurd elements of his theory—penis envy, or the death drive—they continued to pay homage to Freud’s unblinking insight into the human condition. That persona helped Freud to evolve, in the popular imagination, from a scientist into a kind of poet of the mind. And the thing about poets is that they cannot be refuted. No one asks of “Paradise Lost”: But is it true? Freud and his concepts, now converted into metaphors, joined the legion of the undead....The principal reason psychoanalysis triumphed over alternative theories and was taken up in fields outside medicine, like literary criticism, is that it presented its findings as inductive."

Menand also mentions Freud's impact on literary criticism and hermeneutics, which can't be ignored in a casual dismissal of his impact on society. Crews refutes his science, and tackles him as a philosopher as well as a psychologist, but only as a philosopher of science. I believe Freud presents a few positions that are, at least, fodder for contemplation.

Let's just look at Freud's letter to Einstein about the menace of war. About fifteen years prior to promoting the establishment of the United Nations, Einstein tossed some ideas to Freud for consideration and feedback. Here are some of Einstein's questions and concerns:

Conflicts of interest between man and man are resolved, in principle, by the recourse to violence. It is the same in the animal kingdom, from which man cannot claim exclusion; nevertheless, men are also prone to conflicts of opinion, touching, on occasion, the loftiest peaks of abstract thought, which seem to call for settlement by quite another method. This refinement is, however, a late development.... 

Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?... I personally see a simple way of dealing with the superficial (i.e., administrative) aspect of the problem: the setting up, by international consent, of a legislative and judicial body to settle every conflict arising between nations. Each nation would undertake to abide by the orders issued by this legislative body, to invoke its decision in every dispute, to accept its judgments unreservedly and to carry out every measure the tribunal deems necessary for the execution of its decrees. But here, at the outset, I come up against a difficulty; a tribunal is a human institution which, in proportion as the power at its disposal is inadequate to enforce its verdicts, is all the more prone to suffer these to be deflected by extrajudicial pressure. This is a fact with which we have to reckon; law and might inevitably go hand in hand, and juridical decisions approach more nearly the ideal justice demanded by the community (in whose name and interests these verdicts are pronounced) insofar as the community has effective power to compel respect of its juridical ideal.... Thus I am led to my first axiom: The quest of international security involves the unconditional surrender by every nation, in a certain measure, of its liberty of action--its sovereignty that is to say--and it is clear beyond all doubt that no other road can lead to such security....

The ill success, despite their obvious sincerity, of all the efforts made during the last decade to reach this goal leaves us no room to doubt that strong psychological factors are at work which paralyze these efforts. Some of these factors are not far to seek. The craving for power which characterizes the governing class in every nation is hostile to any limitation of the national sovereignty. This political power hunger is often supported by the activities of another group, whose aspirations are on purely mercenary, economic lines. I have especially in mind that small but determined group, active in every nation, composed of individuals who, indifferent to social considerations and restraints, regard warfare, the manufacture and sale of arms, simply as an occasion to advance their personal interests and enlarge their personal authority....

How is it that these devices [propaganda efforts] succeed so well in rousing men to such wild enthusiasm, even to sacrifice their lives? Only one answer is possible. Because man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction. In normal times this passion exists in a latent state, it emerges only in unusual circumstances; but it is a comparatively easy task to call it into play and raise it to the power of a collective psychosis. Here lies, perhaps, the crux of all the complex factors we are considering, an enigma that only the expert in the lore of human instincts can resolve. And so we come to our last question. Is it possible to control man's mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychosis of hate and destructiveness?

Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, had already tried to remedy this problem with consumerism:

"Bernays decided that if people are driven by irrational forces, then they need to be guided. If he could stimulate the inner desires of people and satiate them with things, then they wouldn't act on their aggressive impulses."

Freud went down a different path, more reminiscent of Civilization and its Discontents, published just a couple years earlier. He brings a pessimism to the discussion because he believes it's our nature to be destructive, and that's not going to change. BUT we might have some luck trying to harness our capacity for community: "All that produces ties of sentiment between man and man must serve as war's antidote." And this might work if we could develop the capacity of reason in all people. Anybody with the capacity for rational thought, and able to rise above the throws of the passions, could easily see that war is futile. But that mass appeal to reason is unlikely, something he also argued in Future of an Illusion. Here's part of his response to Einstein:

Even within the group itself, the exercise of violence cannot be avoided when conflicting interests are at stake. But the common needs and habits of men who live in fellowship under the same sky favor a speedy issue of such conflicts and, this being so, the possibilities of peaceful solutions make steady progress. Yet the most casual glance at world history will show an unending series of conflicts between one community and another or a group of others, between large and smaller units, between cities, countries, races, tribes and kingdoms, almost all of which were settled by the ordeal of war. Such war ends either in pillage or in conquest and its fruits, the downfall of the loser. No single all-embracing judgment can be passed on these wars of aggrandizement... Paradoxical as its sounds, we must admit that warfare well might serve to pave the way to that unbroken peace we so desire, for it is war that brings vast empires into being, within whose frontiers all warfare is proscribed by a strong central power. In practice, however, this end is not attained, for as a rule the fruits of victory are but short-lived, the new-created unit falls asunder once again, generally because there can be no true cohesion between the parts that violence has welded. Hitherto, moreover, such conquests have only led to aggregations which, for all their magnitude, had limits, and disputes between these units could be resolved only by recourse to arms. For humanity at large the sole result of all these military enterprises was that, instead of frequent, not to say incessant, little wars, they had now to face great wars which, for all they came less often, were so much the more destructive.... 

There is but one sure way of ending war and that is the establishment, by common consent, of a central control which shall have the last word in every conflict of interests. For this, two things are needed: first, the creation of such a supreme court of judicature; secondly, its investment with adequate executive force. Unless this second requirement be fulfilled, the first is unavailing. Obviously the League of Nations, acting as a Supreme Court, fulfills the first condition; it does not fulfill the second. It has no force at its disposal and can only get it if the members of the new body, its constituent nations, furnish it. And, as things are, this is a forlorn hope.... It would seem that any effort to replace brute force by the might of an ideal is, under present conditions, doomed to fail. Our logic is at fault if we ignore the fact that right is founded on brute force and even today needs violence to maintain it....

You are amazed that it is so easy to infect men with the war fever, and you surmise that man has in him an active instinct for hatred and destruction, amenable to such stimulations. I entirely agree with you. I believe in the existence of this instinct and have been recently at pains to study its manifestations....We assume that human instincts are of two kinds: those that conserve and unify, which we call "erotic" (in the meaning Plato gives to Eros in his Symposium), or else "sexual" (explicitly extending the popular connotation of "sex"); and, secondly, the instincts to destroy and kill, which we assimilate as the aggressive or destructive instincts....Each of these instincts is every whit as indispensable as its opposite, and all the phenomena of life derive from their activity, whether they work in concert or in opposition. It seems that an instinct of either category can operate but rarely in isolation; it is always blended ("alloyed," as we say) with a certain dosage of its opposite, which modifies its aim or even, in certain circumstances, is a prime condition of its attainment. Thus the instinct of self-preservation is certainly of an erotic nature, but to gain its end this very instinct necessitates aggressive action....when a nation is summoned to engage in war, a whole gamut of human motives may respond to this appeal--high and low motives, some openly avowed, others slurred over. The lust for aggression and destruction is certainly included; the innumerable cruelties of history and man's daily life confirm its prevalence and strength. The stimulation of these destructive impulses by appeals to idealism and the erotic instinct naturally facilitate their release. Musing on the atrocities recorded on history's page, we feel that the ideal motive has often served as a camouflage for the dust of destruction; sometimes, as with the cruelties of the Inquisition, it seems that, while the ideal motives occupied the foreground of consciousness, they drew their strength from the destructive instincts submerged in the unconscious. Both interpretations are feasible....

The upshot of these observations, as bearing on the subject in hand, is that there is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity's aggressive tendencies. In some happy corners of the earth, they say, where nature brings forth abundantly whatever man desires, there flourish races whose lives go gently by; unknowing of aggression or constraint. This I can hardly credit; I would like further details about these happy folk....

If the propensity for war be due to the destructive instinct, we have always its counter-agent, Eros, to our hand. All that produces ties of sentiment between man and man must serve us as war's antidote. These ties are of two kinds. First, such relations as those toward a beloved object, void though they be of sexual intent. The psychoanalyst need feel no compunction in mentioning "love" in this connection; religion uses the same language: Love thy neighbor as thyself. A pious injunction, easy to enounce, but hard to carry out! The other bond of sentiment is by way of identification. All that brings out the significant resemblances between men calls into play this feeling of community, identification, whereon is founded, in large measure, the whole edifice of human society....

In your strictures on the abuse of authority I find another suggestion for an indirect attack on the war impulse. That men are divided into the leaders and the led is but another manifestation of their inborn and irremediable inequality. The second class constitutes the vast majority; they need a high command to make decisions for them, to which decisions they usually bow without demur. In this context we would point out that men should be at greater pains than heretofore to form a superior class of independent thinkers, unamenable to intimidation and fervent in the quest of truth, whose function it would be to guide the masses dependent on their lead. There is no need to point out how little the rule of politicians and the Church's ban on liberty of thought encourage such a new creation. The ideal conditions would obviously be found in a community where every man subordinated his instinctive life to the dictates of reason. Nothing less than this could bring about so thorough and so durable a union between men, even if this involved the severance of mutual ties of sentiment. But surely such a hope is utterly utopian, as things are. The other indirect methods of preventing war are certainly more feasible, but entail no quick results. They conjure up an ugly picture of mills that grind so slowly that, before the flour is ready, men are dead of hunger....

Why do we, you and I and many another, protest so vehemently against war, instead of just accepting it as another of life's odious importunities? For it seems a natural thing enough, biologically sound and practically unavoidable. I trust you will not be shocked by my raising such a question. For the better conduct of an inquiry it may be well to don a mask of feigned aloofness. The answer to my query may run as follows: Because every man has a right over his own life and war destroys lives that were full of promise; it forces the individual into situations that shame his manhood, obliging him to murder fellow men, against his will; it ravages material amenities, the fruits of human toil, and much besides. Moreover, wars, as now conducted, afford no scope for acts of heroism according to the old ideals and, given the high perfection of modern arms, war today would mean the sheer extermination of one of the combatants, if not of both. This is so true, so obvious, that we can but wonder why the conduct of war is not banned by general consent....

The cultural development of mankind (some, I know, prefer to call it civilization) has been in progress since immemorial antiquity. ...This process may, perhaps, be likened to the effects of domestication on certain animals--it clearly involves physical changes of structure--but the view that cultural development is an organic process of this order has not yet become generally familiar. The psychic changes which accompany this process of cultural change are striking, and not to be gainsaid. They consist in the progressive rejection of instinctive ends and a scaling down of instinctive reactions. ... Sensations which delighted our forefathers have become neutral or unbearable to us; and, if our ethical and aesthetic ideals have undergone a change, the causes of this are ultimately organic. On the psychological side two of the most important phenomena of culture are, firstly, a strengthening of the intellect, which tends to master our instinctive life, and, secondly, an introversion of the aggressive impulse, with all its consequent benefits and perils. Now war runs most emphatically counter to the psychic disposition imposed on us by the growth of culture; we are therefore bound to resent war, to find it utterly intolerable....

How long have we to wait before the rest of men turn pacifist? Impossible to say, and yet perhaps our hope that these two factors--man's cultural disposition and a well-founded dread of the form that future wars will take--may serve to put an end to war in the near future, is not chimerical. But by what ways or byways this will come about, we cannot guess.

It's not psychoanalysis he's doing here, despite some of the terminology. It's much closer to political philosophy. At the very least, if he's to be judged, it should be for his argumentation, rather than whether his hypotheses have been adequately tested.