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1.
Growing alongside academic psychology has been clinical practice, most notably psychoanalysis.
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Sigmund Freud began his work towards the end of the nineteenth century, when the empirical sciences, in
their high noon of promise, were going to unlock all the mysteries. Previously, questions of human behavior
had been the realm of religion and moral philosophy. Basing his theories totally upon biology, Freud
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became classic iconoclast.
2.
To Victorians who wouldn't even mention bodily functions — let alone sex — in polite society,
Freud declared that their lives were governed by these very things, the most unmentionable in particular.
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«All the emotional relationships of sympathy, friendship, trust, and the like, which can be turned to good
account in our lives.» he wrote, «are genetically linked with sexuality and have developed from pure sexual
desires». According to Freud, everything we do serves ultimately one of two biological functions: to rid
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ourselves of unpleasant external stimulation, such as cold, or to make use what's outside us to satisfy an
internal need, such as — he would say — hunger or sex.
3.
«All instincts which do not find a vent without turn inwards», wrote Nietzche, of whom Freud
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was an avid student. «The whole inner world burst apart when man's external outlet became obstructed».
Freud saw that we sometimes need to «sublimate» such energies into, say, work or arts, or accept restraints
upon them, for the good of society. But such restraints were fundamentally at odds with our nature — not
100 with just part of our nature, but with all of it. An excess of restraints causes the energies to «turn inwards»,
producing neurosis.
4.
Two main streams of clirical theory have challenged Freud's theory in fundamental respects. But
105 where each sight have countered the emerging culture of selfishness, they both ended up giving even more
legitimacy to this culture than Freud had.
B. NEO-FREUDISM
1.
The neo-Freudians like Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Homey, and Erich Fromm thought that Freud
110 had been much too pessimistic in his assessment of human nature. Homey, for example, disagreed strongly
with Freud's view that «there is no liking or disliking of people, no sympathy, no generosity, no feeling of
justice, no devotion to a cause, which is not in the last analysis determined by libidinal or destructive
115 drives». Our actions can arise not just from bodily needs and urges, she maintained but from concern for
others, a desire for justice, and the like. Since we can hold such concerns outside ourselves, the neo-
Freudians. might have seen the potential of both external restrictions and internal standards of conduct in
120 furthering those ends. Having abandoned Freud's biological basis, they had no remaining reason to regard
such prescriptions as fundamentally hostile.
2.
But they did regard these prescriptions as hostile, even more than Freud had. Homey deplored the
125 «tyranny ofshoulds» which «impair the spontaneity of feelings, wishes, thoughts and beliefs». The neo-
Freudians rejected social prescriptions not because we were so bad, as Freud had thought, but because we
were so good. If we were only freed of such restraints and left to get sufficiently in touch with ourselves,
130 the result would be beneficial both for ourselves and others. Homey castigated the «whip of inner dictates»
and declared that she wanted the individual «to dispense with [them] altogether».
3.
The neo-Freudians approached the individual psyche a little the way free market conservatives view
135 the economy. Governmental and other restraints are the problems, and if we just let everybody do their
own thing, it will all work out in the end. These neo-Freudians were therapists working with individual
patients rather than social problems — patients who, for the most part, had strong internal values to begin
140 with. In the background, moreover, was Stalin's Russia and the rise of Nazi Germany in which Goebbels
was calling upon the German nation to «submit the I to thou» and the «individual to the whole». In this
context there seemed compelling reason to focus on the self as the bulwark of human freedom». «Don't be
145 selfish becomes one of the most powerful ideological tools in suppressing spontaneity and the free
development of personality», said Fromm, who was himself German. Neo-Freudians like Fromm did not
urge selfishness; to the contrary, they said that truly loving yourself did not mean striving for pleasure,
150 material gains or success. But they did romanticize the self, seeing it as Rousseau's noble savage, and did
not sufficiently appreciate that darkness comes not only from without — in the form of Hitler — but from
within as well.
C. HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY
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1. If the neo-Freudians romanticized human nature, then the humanistic psychologists like Carl Rogers