Ernest Gellner’s
The Psychoanalytic Movement has become, together with such books as
Adolf Grünbaum’s, or Frank Crewes’s
Memory Wars, one of the classic texts of the by now well-established
tradition of Freud-bashing. As the blurb has it in The Psychoanalytic
Movement Gellner "was as concerned to explain the fabulous success of
psychoanalysis as to debunk its pretensions." Gellner’s
twofold thesis can be expressed, in a nutshell, as follows:

a)      psychoanalysis is based on a
system of ideas which is both untestable and unsubstantiated;

b)      this system of ideas constitutes a
quasi-religious system beliefs and practices, which explains the success of
psychoanalytical theory in becoming the dominant idiom for the discussion of
the human personality and of human relations.

Thesis (a) is not very
original — the unscientific status of psychoanalysis has been frequently denounced
by such thinkers as the aforementioned Grünbaum, or, more famously, Karl
Popper. It is thesis (b) that constitutes the conceptual hub of the book. And
indeed the most remarkable feature of The Psychoanalytic Movement is
that its emphasis lies not on the scientific or therapeutic validity of
psychoanalysis, but rather on the historical circumstances of its creation and
rise, which are regarded as akin to the dynamics of religious belief.

Taking the religious analogy
as his guideline, Gellner aims to explain the social and intellectual success
of psychoanalytical theory in the terms in which a historian of religion might
give an account of, say, the creation and rise of Islam under Muhammad and his
successors. Thus Gellner defines
psychoanalysis as

like
Christianity, […] a founded or historic rather than a traditional system of
beliefs and practices. It has an even more precise point of foundation than
Christianity. Neither the identity nor the existence of its Founder is in
doubt.

In the first chapters of the
book, Gellner briefly locates the Founder (i.e. Freud) within the historical
and sociocultural context of fin-de-siècle Vienna. More broadly, he also
attempts to contextualize the creation of Freudian theory within the history of
ideas. This leads to some rather hilarious generalizations, which Gellner
chooses to expound under such colourful subtitles as "The Last Angel"
(when speaking about Hume’s conception of mankind), "The Harbinger of the
Pays Réel" (that’s Nietzsche), "The
Battering Ram" (that’s the Nietzschean Will to
Power). One might wonder whether these formulae might not be intentionally
comic, were it not for the gross simplifications of
philosophical history that can be found under them:

The great pre-industrial
and pre-scientific civilisations, especially perhaps the Western ones, tend to
see man as half-angel, half-beast. Perhaps there was an earlier stage when he
was more at peace with himself and his instinctual drives […] However, there
can be no doubt but that, with their severe ethics, influential clerisies and
codified expectations, these civilisations do have a marked tendency towards a
kind of dualistic and demanding vision. (p. 10)

Or,

With the coming of a
unitary vision of the world, man had to return to nature, to be seen as part of
it rather than as the fruit of the intrusion of something higher, divine, into
the world. […] So duality was overcome: the old cohabitation of Angel and
Beast was replaced by Hume’s famous ‘Bundle of Perceptions’ (p. 12)

Indeed, Freud is seen by
Gellner as a throwback to the rigid, antinaturalistic dualism predating the
advent of science — in short, to (Western) religion. Thus in chapter 2, "The
Plague", he pursues his religious analogy by linking key concepts of
psychoanalytic theory to religious terms: mental health is equated to the
religious promise of eternal bliss in the afterlife, repression is compared to
Original Sin, psychoanalytic practice is seen as pastoral care, and so on.

More interestingly are the
later chapters, in which the post-Freudian psychoanalytical institution is
analysed and evaluated in terms of the diffusion of a religion and the setup of
a religious establishment. In these chapters some interesting insights can be
found concerning the deficiencies which afflict the institution of
psychoanalysis, particularly in the United States: thus the psychoanalytical
profession is described as

a delimited, duly
authorised, separate and demarcated guild, whose members are in a different
sacramental condition from ordinary people, and who are in a special cognitive
state which alone makes access to the realm in question possible. They, and
they alone, can provide effective pastoral care, solace, support and comfort
[…] What confers authority on their intuitions is
their sacramental state confirmed by the guild, which cannot be subjected to
extraneous, independent checks.

However, despite its
occasional felicities, Gellner’s book suffers from
the same flaw which characterizes his view of the history of ideas:
oversimplification. In regarding Freud and as a dualistic patriarch who would
be bent on the "normalization" of "sinful" (i.e. mentally
unhealthy) human beings according to his own religious doctrine of
psychoanalysis, Gellner collapses several entities into one huge, frightful
ideological bogey.

First of all, in dealing with
psychoanalysis as whole, one must distinguish several layers:

a)      the textual corpus of what
Freud himself wrote;

b)      the interpretations which the
post-Freudians gave to Freudian theory;

c)      the clinical practice established
by the post-Freudians.

A direct reading of the Freudian corpus
makes the notion that Freud sought to establish a quasi-religious movement in
creating psychoanalysis highly risible: for it is hard to see how a man who
described himself as "a godless Jew", a scientist, and a firm
supporter of Darwinian theory might re-create himself
as a sort of latter-day dualistic patriarch. Moreover, as regards morals, for
instance — the basis for most religious oppression –, Freud was remarkably
progressive both for his time and for ours, regarding homosexuality as on a par
with heterosexuality, and giving wide berth for the
professionalization of women.

What Freud’s successors made of Freudian theory is another
matter altogether, and it is here where Gellner certainly might have a point. For the moralistic implications with which post-Freudian theory and
practice became imbued — particularly in the United
States –, as well as the
almost-cultic character of its institutions, certainly are legitimate targets
for criticism.

The book is prefaced with a
useful foreword by José Brunner, in which he expounds Gellner’s
intellectual background as a sociologist and anthropologist, and, curiously
enough, points out the numerous similarities and affinities between Gellner and
Sigmund Freud. In an ironical twist, a foreword bringing together the careers
of critic and criticized may be a fitting introduction to a book which so
thoroughly confuses Freud’s claims with those of his followers.

 

© 2004 Asunción Álvarez

 

Asunción Álvarez, M.A. is an
MPhil/PhD student in the Philosophy of Psychology programme at King’s College
London. Her main research interests are intentionality and mental
representation, as well as the conceptual underpinnings of current
psychological theory and practice. She is currently working on a thesis on
mental representation and trauma.

Categories: Psychoanalysis