I recently finished reading a book (it was for my nonfiction book club – I didn’t choose it) titled Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought by Stephen A. Mitchell and Margaret J. Black (Basic Books, 1995). I’m told they are considered leaders in the field. Our book group likes synoptic works that provide broad insight rather than depth or technical expertise, and Freud and Beyond is one such volume. (Another is Daniel Everett’s Language: the Cultural Tool, which does much the same for linguistics as Mitchell and Black do for psychoanalysis, although Everett’s work is arguably more controversial.)
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
To be honest, I struggled through Freud and Beyond, which covers a complex and, to me, largely unfamiliar swath of modern theory. But it was a fascinating struggle. The terminology and style of discourse of psychoanalytic thought (as opposed to psychoanalysis itself) poses a challenge for the lay reader. (No doubt there are more popular and accessible treatments of the subject). But the tome was rewarding on at least three distinct levels.
Level One is that it surveys an entire horizon of inquiry, and not a trivial one: the essential nature of human thought, emotion, and consciousness. We’re still groping to understand that nexus of subjects; but it behooves all of us to know something about what it means to be human.
Among other things, it means that we have an unconscious: a dark-side-of-the-mental-moon that is in some ways like a second, much more obscure self. That shadow self, for instance, contrives stories that it tells our conscious self, known as dreams. But we never actually see the story-making process. We – at least we laypersons – have no real idea of the boundaries between these two selves, or why they exist in such curious separation. Those stories provide clues to what the hidden self is thinking and feeling and what it’s choosing to tell us. But all we have are the clues.
Freud, more than anyone, initiated the investigation of this relationship. Of course, he didn’t get everything right. Similarly, Plato was arguably wrong about certain fundamental aspects of his philosophy; but more than anyone else, he invented philosophy. One could even argue that he had to make those mistakes to bring philosophy forward. Freud, whatever his shortcomings, was one of a handful of true pioneers of thought.
There have been many other important thinkers in his field. Some 22 names of post-Freudian psychoanalysts are listed on the cover of Freud and Beyond; About half of them I had never heard of. But that tradition aims to solve the most basic mysteries of the mind. It surveys, among other things, early childhood and how we begin life; how we first experience the mother, the breast, and the world as distinct entities; how we gradually gain a sense of ourselves as selves; and that ever-elusive second self, the unconscious.
The second level on which this book and the tradition it examines are revelatory is the therapeutic as opposed to the theoretical one. Psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, social work, and the other helping professions are all about making life a bit more bearable for as many people as possible. Who can argue with that?
Psychoanalysis looks in both directions at once: at how the mind works and how to fix it. A century after Freud, much of that work remains speculative, and only loosely scientific. That doesn’t mean it’s unscientific, but rather that it lies beyond science, or beyond science’s present capacities.
The theoretic and the healing perspectives run closely parallel to one another and are in close conversation. They ask, on a general and on a case level: what is human nature? What are we born with and what do we acquire through experience, how can we grow, love, repair our psychic wounds, overcome our deficits, and come to understand ourselves?
Finally, there’s a third way in which such a book bores into one’s consciousness. Because of the intrinsic nature of the subject, I and others in the reading group found it to be a mirror (and not always pleasant one) of our self-understanding. I couldn’t read it without questioning how I relate to both my shadow-self and my conscious identity.
One doesn’t have to follow the evolving history closely, or feel at ease with the theoretical pathways and rivalries, to experience this mirroring effect. It comes across through the ground it covers. We see it, for example, in the fascinating case studies of actual patients, which are sprinkled like oases across the theoretical desert. The effect is something like looking out of an airplane window and seeing a vast panorama of rugged, unfamiliar terrain, but also seeing your face dimly and strangely reflected in that window.
We don’t always want to see our inner selves in such silhouette; but the curious self-imaging that the book affords feels authentic, and a possible pathway to understanding. It’s something that very few books on other topics provide. And it raises the interesting question: what can we know of the world, and how much can we know, without also knowing ourselves? How much do we need to self-explore if we are to learn anything?
Beyond that: if rationality is the methodological hub of the wheel of liberal learning, is not the human mind, in all its rational, irrational, and irredeemably blended forms, also the very locus of that enterprise? There, at last, is one question that answers itself.