In the opening pages, Andreas Mayer (who made himself known with Dreaming by the Book, a beautiful study written with Lydia Marinelli) announces a profoundly innovative approach to Freud, which would distinguish it from the many existing studies: his book attempts, he asserts, to “understand the theoretical and therapeutic stakes of Freudian psychoanalysis in their socio-historical contexts”, by “emphasizing their situated character”; this contextualization, far from being an exercise in erudition, is necessary for the very understanding of these theories, insofar as the “historical process” has left “traces […] in the texts themselves” (Mayer, 2020, p. 6 and back cover).

What pleads above all for this contextualization is the extraordinary dissemination of psychoanalysis in the contemporary world: far from having reached only specialists, psychoanalytical theories have invaded informal conversations, as multitudes of people have used them to explain their actions, those of their relatives and of many other people; they “have penetrated everyday life, to such an extent that certain Freudian concepts have even become commonplace”; through repeated use, “psychoanalysis has led to a profound transformation of subjectivity in the Western world and beyond” (Mayer, 2020, p. 3 & 111). Attempting to evoke adequately the widespread resonance of Freud’s work, W. H. Auden wrote that it transformed the “whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives” (quoted in Mayer, 2020, p. 3). The extraordinary impact of this work can perhaps be compared to that of Homer’s epics, which were renowned in ancient Greek society and to which they were closely connected: the stories of the heroic adventures of Achilles, Hector, etc., offered models of conduct, paradeigmata to measure oneself against; these warriors embodied the ideals of the collectivity.

1. Omitting the social and cultural contexts of psychoanalysis

This program is as bold as it gets: psychoanalysis is usually conceived, due to tenacious biographical and intellectualist reflexes, in abstraction of its contexts.

Most examinations of Freud’s life and work, suffering from a kind of biographical myopia, “omit their social and cultural contexts” (Mayer, 2020, p. 4). Some of the most adventurous turn their gaze towards an enlarged but nonetheless biographical context, for example a Viennese one, which remains inadequate to shed light on the wide diffusion of psychoanalytic language (in the USA, France, Argentina, etc.).

In addition, the wide social resonance of psychoanalysis is frequently explained (Mayer deplores this) as “the diffusion of a popularized knowledge” (Mayer, 2020, p. 112), as a denaturation of Freud’s theory, which would belong only to the history of ideas (even Serge Moscovici, who regrets that the impact of psychoanalysis is only considered “on the level of art, philosophy or human sciences” (Moscovici, 1976, p. 19 (my translation)), ends up opposing the original theory to its “social representation”). Freud is presented as if he had been content to observe the world scene, withdrawn from it—when in fact he was also a therapist who, by recommending practices for curing and preventing various ills, taught a path to fulfillment in which resonate the ideals of autonomy and authenticity characteristic of our modern societies.

Drawing on the work of Frank J. Sulloway, Mayer notes that this lack of context stems in particular from the many hagiographic accounts that have been told about Freud’s “self-analysis” (starting with the one he himself told): he would have succeeded in revealing the secrets of the unconscious following a solitary confrontation with himself. “The story of Freud’s heroic self-analysis […] may be compared with such equally heroic episodes as Aeneas descent into the underworld to learn his destiny or Moses’ leadership of the Hebrews during the Exodus from Egypt.” (Sulloway, 1992, p. 447) These stories about the creation of psychoanalysis invite us to situate it in a deeply “inner” space (within which Freud interacted with himself). Thus, a “decontextualized image of self-analysis” (Mayer, 2020, p. 29) was established, disfiguring the real psychoanalysis, which “emerges in a well circumscribed space, that of the private treatment of psychoneuroses”, that is, within the context of interaction created by the exchanges between doctors and their patients, and in response to needs that emerged in this context; Freud’s “theoretical conceptions […] are marked by this fact” (Mayer, 2020, p. 6). Here is a valuable research path: there is good reason to believe that a meticulous reconstruction of the genesis of these theories, within this restricted context of interaction, can provide keys to an understanding of the wide resonance these theories subsequently met with; that the highlighting of the ideals that were unobtrusively built-in these theories, and which allowed its creator to guide his interaction with his patient, to negotiate it, notably by convincing her, is likely to clarify significantly the large echo that these theories subsequently encountered (the enthusiasm of the wider society for this new way of accounting for human action plausibly stems from the fact that Freud, in creating it in the first place, was relying on values already championed by that society).

2. The psychoanalytic cure as an echo chamber

The decontextualized account is true to the way Freud portrayed psychoanalysis.

The statement will come as a surprise. After all, he was keenly attentive to the influence of social contexts on the life of the individual, to the myriad ways in which interactions affect him, forming even the way in which she inwardly reports to herself her desires and thoughts. Freud draws our attention on the mark left by the family on the mind of each of us: anticipating the reactions of her parents, whose approval and esteem she seeks, she goes so far as to hide from herself, by repressing them in the depths of her unconscious, the desires and thoughts that could arouse their disapproval. In vain: these desires and thoughts, from this metaphorical space, come back to haunt her in deformed forms, as symptoms (dreams, illnesses, slips of the tongue or of the pen, etc.), which she fails to recognize. Now opaque to herself, this individual, when she attributes desires to her conduct to explain it, puts forward rationalizations: flattering and therefore admissible motives. Thus, Freud sketched out a conception of the relationship to oneself that was simultaneously sociological and dialogical.

But things would happen quite differently in the context of the analytical treatment. Breaking free from the ordinary condition, the patient who follows the rule of free association, escaping the customary control of self-censorship, would reach a purified introspection, freed from the anticipation of the reaction of others: this patient would adopt “an attitude of uncritical self-observation”, in contrast to the one who, by internalizing the voice of others, is also “exercising his critical faculty; this leads him to reject some of the ideas that occur to him after perceiving them” (Freud, 1986 (Standard Edition, subsequently cited as: SE), Volume 4, p. 103 & 101). This patient would be able to observe his mind without taking anyone into account, including his psychoanalyst; the method would ensure that “nothing will be introduced into [the patient’s conduct] by the expectations of the analyst” (SE 20, p. 41). By lifting the repressions that until then blocked his gaze on himself, the patient would dispel the opacity that was preventing his introspection.

As Nathan Stern points out, Freud, in proposing this monological image of the cure, suggests that “the relationship of the patient to the analyst really is a relationship between the patient and himself”, the cure would act as “a simple echo chamber of the singularity of the subjects taking part in it”.

The observations that can be made of the patient undergoing an analytical treatment would […] teach us a priori what a human being is, rather than that which, in the situation, determines the patient’s original reactions. Freud avoids questioning the impact of the analytical process on the patient’s behaviour by systematically claiming that the treatment reveals the profound nature of the affects appearing in daily life. (Stern, 1999, p. 107 & 65 (my translation))

Thus, the patient’s reticence to the analyst’s interpretations would be essentially directed against himself (it would be a resistance, born of a repression and aimed at shielding it). Likewise, the strong emotion that the patient frequently directs towards her analyst, at first sight enigmatic, since it would be “based on no real relation between them” (SE 11, p. 51), would actually aim at another person, with whom she actually interacts (e.g., her parent); the transference of this emotion towards the analyst would thus disclose the patient’s inner fantasies. As Erving Goffman (1974, p. 386) notes, the patient’s action, interpreted in the light of this theory, seems “not quite literal”.

According to this monological image, expression and context, like oil and water, mutually exclude each other: the psychoanalytical treatment would offer the patient with a previously unheard-of expression by removing her from the contexts that normally stifle it. Freud created what Adolf Grünbaum calls the “myth of catalicity”, according to which psychoanalysts are “mere catalysts, expeditors of the unadulterated emergence of repressions previously bottled up by the walls of censorship” (1984, p. 241). The partners of the cure would essentially be spectators, unburdened by the demands of action: the psychoanalyst could perceive the free association of the patient without influencing or even interpreting it (cf. Spence, 1982); the patient could consider her own psychic life with the same kind of passiveness.

Faced with this monological account, Mayer shows himself hesitant. Although he claims to be critical of the decontextualized narratives of self-analysis, he takes at face value the idea that the cure would offer an empty space, away from the inculcated demands that elsewhere impede inner expression, and within which the principles of morality would be “temporarily suspended” (Mayer, 2020, p. 22). Moreover, he also endorses the consecrated idea according to which Freud would have proposed an all-embracing critical theory of moral requirements, from a perspective foreign to moral life (Mayer, 2020, p. 75).

3. A dramatized narrative

The narrative framework underlying this decontextualized image of the cure shapes many of the stories about the widespread metaclinical use of psychoanalysis. Freud dramatically overstated the opposition to psychoanalysis (Sulloway, 1992, p. 494): its main hypothesis, he claimed, “are an insult to the entire world and have earned its dislike” (SE 15, p. 21). As the repression exerted by the internalized criticism of others would be the necessary condition of culture and society (SE 15, p. 22-23), society could not but react with anger to this “relentless exposure of its injurious effects and deficiencies” (SE 11, p. 147); the psychoanalytical unveiling of repressions “is bound […] to provoke denial” (SE 15, p. 11); the person who proposes psychoanalytical explanations would be fated to face “distrust and hostility” (SE 15, p. 16). Psychoanalysis could only be admitted and used in the margins of society. This portrait of psychoanalytic explanation meeting with generalized hostility, and therefore inevitably getting its user into trouble, undoubtedly goes a long way towards lending credence to the idea that this way of accounting for action is beyond rhetoric.

The widespread contemporary echo of this theory could only be the aggregation of innumerable testimonies about separate self-observations, which each person would have accomplished beforehand, without taking into account others. Bruno Bettelheim offers a luminous image of this monological image: “Freud told us about his arduous struggle to achieve ever greater self-awareness”, and “all his writings are […] intimations that we, his readers, would benefit from a similar journey of self-discovery”; he would have acted in such a way that his reader “apply psychoanalytic insights to himself, because only from his inner experience can he fully understand what Freud was writing about” (Bettelheim, 1983, p. 4 & 7).

In spite of his contextualist claims, Mayer reaches an equally monological picture of the prodigious metaclinical diffusion of analytic theory: only self-analysis, “by definition foreign to the medical profession”, could have opened “the doors of psychoanalysis to a wider educated public” (2020, p. 30); for “one of the essential conditions of the Freudian teaching is to have undertaken an analysis oneself” (2020, p. 112). Thus, Mayer also suggests that this diffusion would be an accumulation of separate self-examinations.

4. A relationship just as real as the others?

It is difficult to summarize in a few words how the ethereal portrait of the analytical cure crafted by Freud does not do justice to the real cure: this portrait has given rise to so many objections. Each of its components has been challenged. Freud himself had to give up the argument he had developed to defend the hypothesis that the analyst exercised no influence on the patient (Grünbaum, 1984, p. 127-172). As though the relationship between the analyst and her patient were indeed one, just as real as the others.

What perhaps most inclines us to set this relationship apart from the others is the intense and unusual emotions that the patient directs towards her analyst—we readily see this as a sign of a transference of childish urges. However, as soon as one admits that the interaction between the patient and the analyst is real, one can shed light on these emotions in a quite different way. Some sociologists have argued that the unusual nature of these emotions derives from the equally unusual rules that shape the interaction of these two partners, one of them being induced to reveal intimate secrets to an interlocutor who largely responds by silence (Goffman, 1974, p. 385-387; Gellner, 1993, p. 52-66; Stern, 1999). At first sight, this contextual explanatory path seems less fragile: it involves neither hypotheses about processes operating in the unfathomable depths of the unconscious, nor reconstructions of frequently forgotten childhood events.

It should be noted that the analyst uses the monological narrative to influence the patient, directing her attention to her relationship with herself and away from their relationship. She can, for instance, use the theory of resistance to ask the patient who refuses to acknowledge to her psychoanalyst the repressed motive that the latter attributes to her if she does not do so in order to avoid acknowledging it to herself; similarly, the analyst who explains such and such a reaction of his patient towards him by a transference, as François Roustang remarks, “eludes himself as a particular person”, he “shelters himself from the interrogations on what he does and what he provokes” (1982, p. 27 & 32 (my translation)).

5. Extrospection

According to Bettelheim and Mayer, the extra-clinical recourse to psychoanalysis would essentially constitute a practice of self-description, carried out away from collective expectations. The widespread dissemination of this theory, its penetration into a wide variety of circles, would in no way constitute a social phenomenon. Introduction à Sigmund Freud is built in accordance with this idea. Any historian dealing with the reception of an idea within given groups will undertake to identify the conditions that favorably or unfavorably dispose them towards it. Yet Mayer devotes not a single line to the societies that enthusiastically embraced psychoanalysis: he deals neither with their organizing practices, nor with their imaginaries or their values, nor with their needs. In fact, he continues to approach Freud’s ideas following the biographical and intellectualist habits: he reconstructs localized political contexts, which may shed light not on the creation or diffusion of the main psychoanalytical theories, but on the specific uses of these theories by Freud (for example, the “context defined by the establishment of the Austrofascist state in 1934” (Mayer, 2020, p. 106)); he focuses on the “forms of reception of the Freudian oeuvre in the human and social sciences” (Mayer, 2020, p. 112). As if he had forgotten his contextualist program.

According to him, Freud’s readers would have undertaken a self-analysis by following “the example given by the author”, who, by showing them how he had examined himself, would have provided a “demonstration of a new technique of observation on the basis of autobiographical material” (Mayer, 2020, p. 30). Now, the vast majority of Freud’s demonstrations refer to people other than himself—including, of course, his many patients. Her readers followed his example: as Moscovici pointed out (1976, p. 187-188), they abundantly used psychoanalysis to explain the desires and thoughts of others (and, in the vast majority of cases, without having first undertaken an analysis). For instance, American industrial psychologists readily asserted, during a period of labor unrest, that employees angry at their employers were merely “projecting their own maladjustments upon a conjured monster, the capitalists” (Stearns, 1994, p. 123).

The monological story does not even adequately describe cases where people invoke psychoanalysis to explain their own conduct, if only because the self-examination they engage in occurs following instruction or solicitation by others. Freud had shown his readers how one could ask different interlocutors to explain their motivations, even for phenomena which, until then, had never provoked this request (he notably claimed the right to “question” the dreamer “as to what his dreams mean” (SE 15, p. 100)). In the circles where the psychoanalytical explanation of behaviors was credited with explanatory power, everyone expected to be asked such a question. “No one could make a slip of any kind without immediately being called on to evoke free associations to explain it.” (Abraham Brill, quoted in Erving Goffman, 1974, p. 386)

This testimony reminds us that the person who attempts to express through speech the repressed desire hitherto expressed by her symptoms is far from expressing it as directly as the person who says she is hungry or thirsty. As these symptoms initially appear enigmatic to her, she approaches them “as if they belonged to someone else” (SE 14, p. 169): from the outside, so to speak by extrospection. Furthermore, as the main interested party’s vision is obstructed by her resistances, she is even less able to recognize her desire in her symptom than a truly external witness of this symptom: “we often fail to hear our own slips, though never other people’s” (SE 15, p. 68). The psychoanalytical understanding of one’s unconscious desire, the understanding that supposedly could only be reached by expelling the internalized voice of others, is in fact achieved via the intermediary of the word of an interlocutor, which generates the distance allowing the renewal of the view of oneself (the psychoanalyst, “this other person who is indispensable for me to be able to tell the truth about myself”, as Michel Foucault noted (2011, p. 5 (translation modified))).

Psychoanalysis calls for third person narratives: the cardinal psychoanalytical theories (that of repression and resistance) direct our attention to situations in which the principal concerned is blind to the motives of her conduct, which the witness of this conduct, in contrast, perceives without difficulty (SE 6, p. 211). The fact that these theories were developed in a clinical context, by a doctor who was busy developing narratives of his patients that were incompatible with the ones these patients told him, has (to speak as Mayer) left traces on these theories. Due to the precedence they give to the witness’s perspective, it is hardly surprising that they were later frequently used by various observers of new behaviors, if only because they offered them the very same benefit as they offered psychoanalysts. Thus, the industrial psychologists, by affirming that the anger of the workers was directed at the wrong person, adopted the trick first used by the psychoanalysts, but this time for the benefit of their employer, who could just as well, by denying any basis to the recriminations of his employees, eludes himself and shelters himself from interrogations. Similarly, the theory of resistance helped in many contexts to discredit the rebuttals of those who rejected psychoanalytic explanations of their behaviors (Freud had warned that such resistances “would be bound to appear in healthy people too, as soon as some external sources confronted them with was repressed” (SE 14, p. 23-24)).

6. A theory invested with authority

We can glimpse here that psychoanalytical explanations, far from being hermetically cut off from moral judgments and rhetorical attempts at persuasion, make it possible, by placing actions under a certain moral light, to elicit approval or disapproval.

If one could use this theory to justify some conducts, to challenge others, it is notably because it has often been invested with a genuine authority. Psychoanalytical explanations, allegedly doomed to provoke repulsion, have been received favorably in many circles. “Talking about sexuality, conflicts with one’s parents, such and such a neurosis has become licit, even recommended.” (Moscovici, 1976, p. 23-24 (my translation))

In fact, when Freud wrote that psychoanalytical explanations could only meet with animosity, he was challenging his readers and putting them to the test: would they be able to overcome in themselves an instinctive opposition (SE 15, p. 15-16)? Would they love truth and freedom enough to recognize their inner drives and free themselves from the internalized control of parental tutelage? Would they find the necessary strength? That which he himself had proved, first by overcoming (through his self-analysis) his own repressions, but also, subsequently, by undertaking to pass on his message at all costs, despite the incessant attacks of all those who refused to listen to the “harshest” and “unwelcome truths which we […] have to tell the world” (SE 11, p. 147-148). For Freud presented himself as a parrhesiastes, someone who straightforwardly tells their truths to his contemporaries, despite the sacrifices and risks involved. He warned his readers: “we make an individual our enemy by uncovering what is repressed in him” (SE 11, p. 147); the one who reveals her inadmissible motives to him must be prepared to incur his “vengeance” and not to remain “unscathed” (SE 7, p. 109). He said he had to wage “a threefold battle”, not only against his own resistances, but also against those of “opponents” of psychoanalysis and those of his patients, who “behave like opponents” (SE 12, p. 170). One owes Foucault, who familiarized us with this figure of the truth teller, an analysis of the “parrhesiastic game” which describes quite well Freud’s brilliant rhetorical manoeuvre:

[…] one attempts to force the listener to accept a truth which hurts him […]. One forces them to accept this hurtful truth by wounding them a second time with a further reproach. This new reproach consists in saying: In any case, you are not capable of accepting the truth. […] It is a sort of challenge-blackmail […]. (Foucault, 2011, p. 38-39)

Freud stressed that this relentless opposition had certainly not stopped him, as he had “learnt […] to rise superior to the disapproval of his contemporaries” (SE 21, p. 36), facing opprobrium with unparalleled “moral courage”, showing that he “was not subject to influence from any quarter” (SE 14, p. 22). By staging himself in this way, he had created an exhilarating model of heroism; his readers could, if they took up his challenge, by accepting the supposedly unacceptable truths that he revealed to them, engage in their turn on this path of self-overcoming, by measuring themselves against his model. In two words, the story of the essential unacceptability of psychoanalysis, as it served to challenge the reader, elicited a self-defeating prophecy: by claiming that psychoanalytic explanations were repulsive, it contributed to make them attractive.

The tangible repercussions of this homegrown historical narrative on the course of events show that the historian should not simply dismiss it, in favor of a more professional explanation; as Sulloway (1992, p. 5) writes, the largely “mythical” story of the history of psychoanalysis crafted by its supporters, being “an integral and fascinating part of the historical process”, which it shaped, should also be replaced in its context.

So, the dramatized narrative created by Freud is gratifying: it allows the person who resorts to psychoanalytical explanations to place herself under a flattering moral light and thus to obtain approval and esteem; her use of this theory attests to her courage and independence (in contrast, reticence towards these explanations, once redescribed as resistance, betrays fear and conformism).

This narrative thus contributes to defining the respective positions of the partners of the exchange within which psychoanalysis is invoked, to placing this exchange within a certain frame, in the sense given to this term by Goffman (1974): a setting of an interaction in a perspective that orders it by giving it a specific meaning. In short, the recourse to the analytical theory, as Moscovici points out, is far from taking place via “a vague and precarious internalization”; “by placing the relationships between people and the way they are experienced in a different context”, it “mediates between members of the same group”; it thus has something of “objective and, in sum, of exterior” (1976, p. 182 (my translation)).

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Jean-Baptiste Lamarche