Many of Freud’s questions concerned the nature of knowing. How do we know, for example, what is true or false? Freud said this was the question that guided his entire life. What it means to know something—whether or not such and such a thing is true—isn’t exactly the same thing as determining whether something is real. But obviously the two are related and at a certain point overlap. Questions about what we can know for sure tend to rely on statements we make about the thing we’re questioning. “Is it true that I’m feeling sad?”, for example, is a statement that may lead to the nature of sadness, or it may suggest how out of touch I am with my feelings. This is why false statements can be construed as lies if the person says them knowingly, or error if the person says them unknowingly. Freud believed that people who make false statements could do so unknowingly while having a purposeful, ulterior motive for doing so. He referred to this as an unconscious act, but he was raising epistemological, not psychological questions: How can I know what I deny and not know that I deny it? Knowledge always implies a truth about whatever it is I’m supposed to know. This is what epistemology is concerned with: How do I know what I know?
Freud wasn’t formally schooled in philosophy in the academic sense, but he was concerned with philosophical questions. He tried to couch them in the terminology of science and psychology. This has led to accusations that he reduced some of these questions to “psychologistic” and “scientistic” explanations. For example, psychologism assumes that all philosophical questions can be reduced to mental criteria. This borders on the rationalist idea that the totality of existence is based on rational constructs. But it’s obvious that Freud didn’t really believe this. He was a profoundly practical person who insisted that neurotics weren’t sufficiently practical themselves. The accusations of “scientism” follow a similar fate. Scientism insists anything that doesn’t conform to empirical or rational rules of evidence isn’t valid. In other words, it has no truth value. Freud’s theory of the unconscious defies scientific norms to such a degree that psychoanalysis is still rejected by the scientific community as anything remotely scientific.
Despite Freud’s identification with science, it isn’t true that he ignored philosophers or that he rejected philosophy out of hand. One of the problems in recognizing the pervasive philosophical concerns in Freud’s thinking is that the philosophers who influenced him weren’t conventional, modern philosophers. He was principally influenced by the Greeks—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. He was profoundly indebted to Greek myths, to such a degree that he adopted the Greek attitude about human emotion as universally valid. His ideas about passion, tragedy, and deception reveal a predominandy Greek view of life. It permeates everything he came to believe about the origins and nature of psychopathology, a psychological term that fails to grasp the devious and melodramatic underpinnings of human passion.
Freud alluded to the problem of truth and reality in both literal and philosophical contexts. He used these two concepts interchangeably and often metaphorically. But when he tried to modernize these ancient questions by insisting they were psychological in nature, he obscured the inherently ethical principles that underpinned what eventually became psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis—to the degree that it’s used to help people get well—is an ethic, in Aristotle’s sense. This form of ethic, however, goes further than the “Hippocratic Code” because it is essentially concerned with our manner of living and what’s wrong—or right—with it. This is what every person who enters analysis comes to explore. It concerns the matter that troubles our souls, the tangible, concrete preoccupations that psychoanalysis was invented to address.
Freud held that the aim of psychoanalysis was to make the unconscious conscious. The nature of the psychoanalytic cure—how to define and how to effect it—was, nonetheless, problematical. Is the process of expanding one’s consciousness over and above the unconscious repressions the necessary path to cure? Or is it cure itself? What’s more, what does the expression, “making the unconscious conscious,” really mean? Psychoanalysis, as Freud conceived it, is essentially concerned with helping us determine what is going on in our lives. It tries to disclose the secrets we hide from awareness, secrets we deny exist. Paradoxically, it’s these secrets that evoke our deepest fears about reality, whatever we imagine reality to be. We may be right about reality or we may be wrong. But whatever we are convinced is the case invariably prompts those frustrations we endeavor to conceal. This isn’t particularly viable because the things we hide come back to haunt us in indirect ways. We eventually suffer from the secrets we harbor, the same secrets that alert us to the things we fear about reality. These secrets contain a truth, not because they necessarily reveal the nature of reality, but because the things we conceal seem too real to accept.
Psychoanalysis is concerned with revealing the truth about a reality we’re predisposed against. The analytic cure, as Freud conceived it, is based on the premise that it’s better to know where we stand than to avoid reality, however painful that reality is. Freud didn’t talk about truths, per se, but he talked at length about the nature of secrecy, hidden wishes, repressed desires, unconscious motives, displaced libido, and avoided realities. He was a philosopher of truth who never included this term as an integral part of his theory. If we want to determine the place truth enjoyed in Freud’s conception of psychoanalysis, we will have to extract it from the context in which he alluded to it. Ultimately, we will find it contained in his many references to our inherent difficulty with reality, and the significance he believed that reality assumes in our lives.
Freud discussed his conception of reality in at least five contexts: (a) inner (psychical) reality versus outer (external) reality; (b) realistic versus neurotic anxiety; (c) realistic (secondary thought process) versus wishful (primary thought process) thinking; (d) the neurotic versus psychotic experience of reality; and (e) real love versus transference-love. I would like to examine each of these contexts in turn to show how Freud tried to formulate a program of psychoanalytic enquiry based on a search for truth—essentially, a philosophical endeavor—while his objective was to get to the “facts” of observable behavior. However scientific his argument appeared, there’s no doubt Freud was searching for the truth—whatever he thought about the facts he discovered.
1 Psychical and External Reality
Freud rather reluctandy reached the conclusion that neurosis could neither be explained by nor limited to traumatic events. It wasn’t until his “On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,” published in 1914, that he confessed his despair over the discovery that his seduction theory (that hysteria was the consequence of having been seduced by one’s parent) could not explain, in every case, the genesis of hysterical neurosis:
The firm ground of reality was gone. . . . If hysterical subjects trace back their symptoms to traumas that are fictitious, then the new fact which emerges is precisely that they create such scenes in phantasy, and this psychical reality requires to be taken into account alongside practical reality. (1957b, 17–18)
In a recent study of psychoanalysis, Marshall Edelson suggests that “Freud’s discovery of psychic reality is described reluctandy in relatively few passages throughout his writings; yet, it is the foundation of all his major achievements. Rarely has any discovery been made so contrary to the intentions and predilections of its discoverer” (1988, 3). Freud arrived at the concept