Frosh - A Brief Introduction to Psychoanalytic Theory

Also by Stephen Frosh:

Feelings

Psychoanalysis outside the Clinic: Interventions in Psychosocial Studies*

For and Against Psychoanalysis

Hate and the Jewish Science: Anti-Semitism, Nazism and Psychoanalysis*

Critical Narrative Analysis in Psychology (with Peter Emerson)*

Key Concepts in Psychoanalysis

After Words: The Personal in Gender, Culture and Psychotherapy*

Young Masculinities: Understanding Boys in Contemporary Society (with Ann Phoenix and Rob Pattman)*

The Politics of Psychoanalysis*

Sexual Difference: Masculinity and Psychoanalysis

Child Sexual Abuse (with Danya Glaser)*

Identity Crisis: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and the Self*

Psychoanalysis and Psychology*

*Also published by Palgrave Macmillan

Stephen Frosh 2012

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First published 2012 by

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Printed in China

I would like especially to thank Catherine Gray at Palgrave Macmillan, who insisted that I write this book and provided an extraordinary editorial service. Most of the good things in the book are a result of her advice.

Thanks also to Joel and Alec, who encouraged me to produce this book for people like them.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers would be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

Psychoanalysis can claim to be one of the most influential intellectual and practical projects of modern times. It was invented by Sigmund Freud and others towards the end of the nineteenth century, during the same period that other major social sciences (including psychology and sociology) were coming into being. It rapidly became prominent in clinical, academic and artistic circles and in some branches of commerce, notably advertising and public relations (Zaretsky, 2004). Psychoanalysis was also a major spur to the professions of psychotherapy and counselling that grew up in the twentieth century. It had a dramatic impact on treatment methods and was especially important in advancing the psychological therapy of shell-shocked patients during both World Wars. Many of its ideas became part of the taken-for-granted psychological understanding that people have about themselves and others. This applies especially to the proposal that peoples behaviour is strongly affected by unconscious impulses about which they know little and over which they have only limited control. The belief that talking about psychological problems might help a person deal with them, or that our dreams might reveal something about our deep wishes and conflicts, or that slips of the tongue might have significance, is premised on a generally psychoanalytic understanding about how the unconscious works. Ways of thinking about child development, about intimate relationships and about the meaning of psychological symptoms have all been profoundly affected by psychoanalytic theories.

Despite this extensive influence, the standing of psychoanalysis as a discipline possessing valid knowledge about human psychology remains uncertain. Freud claimed that psychoanalysis was a science and that its value lay in the way in which it identified the real sources of psychological life. This has always been heavily debated, with several writers raising serious doubts about whether psychoanalysis ever fulfilled the requirements of scientific practice (for example Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani, 2012) or whether it has been supported or disproven by evidence (Grnbaum, 1984). Defenders of psychoanalysis have argued that many of these critics have used a very idealized version of science in order to make their point, and also that psychoanalysis actually does have rational and testable approaches to knowledge, shown in the laboratory of the consulting room and in its growing openness to scrutiny in terms of reports and discussions of its clinical work (Frosh, 2006). For yet others, psychoanalysis is seen more as an artistic or humanistic approach to imaginative understanding, and does not need to pretend to be a science in order to have validity.

There is also something more general to say about the standing of psychoanalysis. This is a slightly complicated idea that has to do with what is called the reflexivity of human beings. What this refers to is the way in which people seek meaning through interpreting their own actions and thoughts and those of others. Humans can perhaps be seen as meaning-making machines. The argument here is that one universal characteristic of people is that they try to find ways to work out what they are about and on the whole that they do this in the context of their relationships with others. We go through life reflecting on ourselves to a greater or lesser extent; and it not only a psychoanalytic truism to think that the depth and extent of someones capacity for such reflection might be a measure of their standing as a person.

How do we make sense of ourselves? It has to be through drawing on our experiences and our behaviour and employing the ideas that can be found around us in our culture to help us interpret these. Among these ideas are some that derive from psychoanalysis, which we might use even if we have never read any psychoanalytic theory. For instance, the notion that childhood experiences matter for the way in which we later form relationships as adults is a very widespread one. The failure to make good relationships might be interpreted as a consequence of difficulties we had with our parents, maybe because we had an abandoning and rejecting father or a depressed and unresponsive mother. It is not necessary to know any psychoanalytic theory to hold this view; but psychoanalysis speaks cogently to it and provides a framework to support and consolidate such lay understandings.