Apart from Freud: Notes for a Rational Psychoanalysis

Abstract

JONATHAN COHEN: Apart from Freud: Notes for Rational Psychoanalysis. City Light Books, San Francisco, CA, 2001, 239 pp., $18.95, ISBN: 0-87286-378-6. A without Freud, or indeed, Apart from Freud, the provocative title of Jonathan Cohen's book on the hidden politics of psychoanalytic theory, will strike many readers as paradoxical or even absurd. How can there be that excludes the theoretical ideas of its founder? Yet, I believe Cohen makes strong case for his proposition. The author argues that he is unwilling to create yet another new school with its new terminology and that it would be better to proceed with revised form of psychoanalysis, holding on to its two most important, and in the author's eyes, most valid beliefs, the importance of early experiences and the unconscious. He suggests that we simply consider Freudianism as special case of psychoanalysis (p. ix). Cohen thinks Freud's initial intuitive insights were usually correct, but that he tended to modify (and distort) them to fit his conservative sociopolitical views, based on the burgeoning capitalist system of the time and on the philosophers who extolled it. He also regards many psychoanalytic revisionist attempts, such as hermeneutic or narrative theories, as not having addressed what he views from his liberal perspective as Freud's basic moral flaw. Jonathan Cohen, practicing psychoanalyst of over 25 years, who, judging from the book has in-depth knowledge of such fields as philosophy, linguistics, sociobiology, and political science, draws on these diverse fields to demonstrate Freud's theoretical fallacies. In addition, he uses very close reading of Freud's ideas and an equally close examination of the progression (or regression) of these ideas through time. The book is rare in-depth philosophical analysis of Freud's entire work. Apart from Freud is composed in circular, rather than linear fashion, with themes that reappear repeatedly in new configurations. An abstract thus presents considerable challenge to this reviewer! Cohen's most profound criticisms revolve around Freud's instinct theories, and their development from postulation of libido and self-preservation instincts-the latter of which Cohen views as potential source of moral propensities-to replacement of the self-preservation instinct by the aggressive instinct, arriving at Freud's well-known dual instinct of 1920 (p. 96). Before that, aggression had merely been defined as a response to threats to the self (p. 96). In Cohen's eyes this move, rather than the much discussed relinquishing of the seduction theory was watershed that removed from any sociopolitical reality eliminating social reasons for aggression. An even more dramatic move in the same direction was Freud's later years' invention of death instinct. Cohen attributes the shift in Freud's thinking to the horrors of World War I. Either there was something terribly flawed [about social institutions] or ... humans were perverse beasts who could not be effectively civilized under the best of circumstances (p. 98). Freud started to consistently choose the second alternative in his theorizing. Another aspect of his pessimistic vision is Freud's basic premise, shared with Hume and other philosophers of the liberal market economy, that the propensities of human nature and the needs of civilized society are in direct opposition, necessitating the inevitable repression and suppression of instinctual desires and leading to neurosis if this conflict between instincts and society was not successfully negotiated. Children, according to Freud would only become acceptable members of their society by being vigorously socialized into their parents' conventional world view, thus perpetuating the status quo. Freud's dark view of human nature, thinks Cohen, thus demands, by implication, oppressive authority to keep order in society. …