A PHYLOGENETIC FANTASY.

Overview of the Transference Neuroses.  

By Sigmund Freud. Edited and with an essay by use Ilse Grubrich-Simitis.  

Translated by Axel Hoffer and Peter T. Hoffer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.

 Reviewer: Vann Spruiell, M.D.

It was a pleasure to work on this review. The book is excellent because it adds so much information about Freud's work, because it is translated and edited so well, and because the critical discussion by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis could stand independently as an original contribution. In particular, it adds to our knowledge of Freud's creative discussion of creativity. As nearly as I can tell, it seems that not many people have read this book. I hope my review may whet some appetites! 

By mid-1915 Freud had more or less completed the twelve chapters of what he hoped would be his magnum opus on psychoanalytic theory, the successor to Chapter Vll of The Interpretation of Dreams. The book on metapsychology was written in gloomy times when there were few patients and only one available close collaborator, Sandor Ferenczi. Despite the hard times, or because of them, the work took on a life of its own. First conceived as a completion and summation, and written under the duress of what Freud called his "bad moods" (he even said the first metapsychological papers functioned as sedation), the subsequent papers led to new, not only old ideas. Stimulation replaced sedation; Freud soared into audacious fantasies about our origins as social (and neurotic) beings.

During the next two years he read the literature by and about Lamarck, and planned a joint paper with Ferenczi on the subject of inherited racial memories. But then, gradually or suddenly, he abandoned both the joint venture and his own book. Five of the chapters were published as individual papers, "Instincts and their vicissitudes," "Repression," "The Unconscious," "Mourning and Melancholia," and "A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams." They rank among our classics. But presumably Freud destroyed the manuscripts of the other seven.

It is natural that psychoanalysts have puzzled about what was in the seven "lost" essays—and Freud's motives for "losing" them. We knew several of their subjects: consciousness (thus, reality), conversion hysteria, obsessional neurosis, anxiety, and a synthesis of the transference neuroses (Strachey speculated that the two other papers were about sublimation and projection). Judging from what is known about Freud's other interests during this period, these essays almost certainly would have included discussions of the following: narcissism; the general concept of transference, including not only the phenomena observed clinically but the relationship of transference neuroses to narcissistic neuroses; brain-mind, biological-psychological phenomena implied by the interrelated influences of constitutional and experiential determinants (the Principle of Complementarity). And we might have guessed, because it was known that Freud strongly held to Lamarck's belief in the heritability of experiences, and because of the existence of Totem and Taboo, that he would speculate about the origins of mankind—the phylogeny and ontogeny of humans as psychological and social beings.

What a loss! And for those of us interested in Freud's inner motivations, what frustration! But not everyone would agree; there are analysts disinclined to read about a largely discredited biological theory of the past, and there are analysts who believe we pay far too much attention to the past in general, and specifically to Freud's personal history. Better to attend to the present and future, they say. I disagree, but it is necessary to ask, was the decision to destroy the unpublished papers an intellectual loss? And, except to satisfy idle curiosities and biographers, do we have other needs to know what we can about Freud's motivations? He demonstrated in action that he believed psychoanalysis would be better off without the destroyed writings. And presumably, as a man who had exposed the inner workings of his mind to strangers to an unprecedented degree, he also thought that decisions about what to publish or not were his own business. Wasn't he justified?

In partial answer to the first question, we need only remember the astonishing burst of creativity which succeeded (perhaps caused) the giving up the book. Instead of ending his life's work at about the age of sixty, Freud during the next twenty years transformed psychoanalysis—clinically, theoretically, and professionally. It is entirely possible that the missing chapters, had they been made public, would have interfered with these private and public transformations. But now we are in a different place. Surely we have sufficient distance from the scientific and intra-disciplinary political issues of the 1920 s to be trusted to know what was lost.

Of course Freud had a right to personal privacy, but he has been dead for more than fifty years. Mortal rights, even as dispersed among descendants, gradually disappear, especially in regard to great men and women. In any new intellectual discipline, the early group needs to follow an heroically conceived leader need to give way to more impersonalized contributions and governance. Furthermore, as psychoanalysts know about themselves and their analysands, authentic insights into the mind of another are infinitely more interesting than idealized images—no matter the gifts of the idolater or his subject. It would be best for all of us to know everything that can be known about Freud: we are now in position to appreciate his genius more as a human than as a mythological figure.

Even more important is a full understanding of Freud's work as a whole. There is a particularly unfortunate tendency among some psychoanalysts to scotomatize those aspects of Freud's thought that are currently out of fashion or have found no support in the years after he enunciated them. If acknowledged at all, they are dismissed as vagaries or eccentricities. Worse, enemies of psychoanalysis use them to justify notions that psychoanalysis is essentially silly or evil. Freud remained loyal to some of his least generally acceptable beliefs, no matter what evidence or opinions countered them. We may find difficulties in seeing, for example, nosological categories as exactly as he classified them. Freud certainly understood the difficulties for others of some of his concepts, although we do not know to what extent he saw for himself that they were problematic. It is useful, however, to remember that he learned most when confronted with "difficulties." He was intrepid. Obstacles were due full respect and analysis, just as are the analyses of intrapsychic resistances. Adversity can be, probably always can be, the impetus to creation.

In 1983 a piece of the puzzle about the lost chapters turned up unexpectedly. Ilse Grubrich-Simibs, working on the extensive correspondence between Freud and Ferenczi (much of which is still kept privately) came across a remarkable letter from Freud, dated July 28^th, 1915. It contained, in manuscript form, the draft of the twelfth and final chapter of the book. It was given the provisional title, "Overview of the Transference Neuroses."

However, that title doesn't quite fit the text. It is an overview of the transference neuroses and the "narcissistic neuroses," an organized synthesis of the nosology of that time. Besides that, it is a presentation of what Freud called a "phylogenetic fantasy," an astonishing set of guesses about the origin of each diagnostic entity in a specific pre-historical period. It is not quite clear who was responsible for making this phrase of Freud's the primary title of the book in the English translation; some will argue that it is too partial—that at the very least it could have included the "narcissistic neuroses." But contents are important, titles not very.

Whatever else might be said about it, the phylogenetic fantasy, or "fiction." is startling. Freud was probably as sophisticated as any person of his time (or ours) about the necessities, values, and defects of the uses of fantasy (thus, in part, the uses of fiction) in artistic, historical, and especially scientific matters.

While he often downplayed his own playful bent, claiming to work arduously and drearily, piling one little empirical observation on another in order to develop theories, he was more candid when he called himself a conquistador. The 1914 "On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement," contains the remark that he had laboriously "learned to restrain speculative tendencies." In fact, in the book under review, we learn of a letter to Ferenczi, written on April 8^th, 1915, in which he described the mechanism of creativity as "the succession of daringly playful fantasy and relentlessly realistic criticism" (p.83). Grubrich-Simitis believes that it was the criticism that stalled the fantasy in the instance of the twelfth chapter. Unlike the others, it could not be compared to clinical data.

The first section of this well-developed draft of "A Phylogenetic Fantasy" is written in a condensed, almost shorthand form. It covers familiar territory already partly spelled out in "The Unconscious," and "On Repression." But it also organizes the observations and theories in a proposed nosological series: first, the three transference neuroses (anxiety hysteria, conversion hysteria, obsessional neurosis) associated with the narcissistic neuroses (dementia praecox, paranoia, melancholia-depression). They are related and compared according to six variables: repression tin its general earlier sense, not its later specific sense), anticathexis, substitutive-and symptom-formation, sexual function, regression, fixation and disposition.

The first five of these had been well-considered in the published papers. The last, disposition, had only received glancing mention. But any close reader of Freud will find the word all over the place in various writings, for example, in the footnotes added in 1915 to "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality," or in the Introductory Lectures as the Principle of Complementarity—the mutual, complementary influences of endowment and experience. Freud also mentioned in numerous places his belief that included in each of us, as part of biological endowment, are records of previous group experiences of the race. Thus, biology for Freud included conventional biological theories and the ideas of Lamarck.

These latter ideas, of course, have received no scientific support—especially since the years of the tacky neo-Lamarckianism of Stalin's Lysenko. But I want to point out, in agreement with the commentary on Freud's thought in this book, that the biological theories of the future will most likely differ from our currently accepted versions in as revolutionary way as Freud's thought differed from previous biological, psychological, and medical "certainties."

This book demonstrates that not only did Freud stubbornly hold to Lamarckian beliefs, he extended them in reference to postulated origins of what he called the transference and narcissistic neuroses. The resulting sweeping synthesis, he thought, helped explain the choice of neurosis and the awesomely intense forces involved. The synthesis holds that the series of neuroses "seems to repeat phylogenetically an historical origin." What are now neuroses tend what nowadays we would call psychoses) were once phases in human conditions during the last ice age and its aftermath.

The first phase came, Freud speculated, in the face of the danger of group extinction during the waxing and waning of the ice age. It resulted in the development of a firm patriarchal system. First, it became the norm to react in intrapsychic ways like those seen in contemporary anxiety hysteria; later, the norm came to be to react with repression like that seen in conversion hysteria; lastly to react with obsessional organizations. The second phase, in the aftermath of the ice age, had to do with the development of the social stage of civilization.

The second, social, phase related originally to the castration of the sons (and exile of those who escaped actual castration) by an increasingly tyrannical father; Freud connected the development of dementia praecox to such actual or symbolic castrations. Later the surviving sons returned arid the tyrant. That pre-historical tragedy was related to behavior "normal" for the times, now seen psychopathologically in paranoia. The extreme narcissistic neurosis was "melancholia-mania," which reflected the guilt, denials and subsequent chaos after the murder of the Leader.

Because of our habits of thinking it seems odd to us that Freud located the narcissistic neuroses developmenta11y after the transference neurotic organizations had been elaborated. But it is not strange when it is remembered that he originally thought that narcissistic libido was transformed into object libido during adolescence—long after the primary mechanisms in the transference neuroses had been elaborated during the Oedipal period. Freud even remarked that there seemed to be an inverse relationship between the two series: the later the disorder developed, the earlier were the developmental points to which regression occurred.

We do not have to believe in this fantasy to find it a valuable "difficulty."

Now, translated into English, we have a beautiful little book, in fact, four gifts: 1) facsimiles of the actual Freudian handwritten text, lovingly printed verbatim in facing pages; 2) an explanatory rendering of the text in German by Grubrich-Simitis, translated into English; 3) an extensive essay by her, "Metapsychology and Metabiology," which not only helps distinguish what is probable from what is improbable in our thoughts about the Freud who made the work, but also is one of the best approaches to Freud's metapsychology in the literature; 4) and the fourth gift is the Forward by the Drs. Hoffer—they are brothers—who translated the work into English; in addressing the complications of such a translation they add a great deal to its worth. The translation itself smoothly; one forgets that it is a translation. I am told by colleagues who are qualified to judge that it conforms to the highest levels of scholarship.

The book belongs to Grubrich-Simitis as much as it does to Freud. Her scholarly contribution was necessary to make Freud's handwritten manuscript, much of it written in abbreviations, intelligible. She adds an understandable context which touches on much more than what is included in Freud's "phylogenetic fantasy" itself. To do this, most of the massive correspondence between Freud and Ferenczi was made available to her, although she still did not have permission to quote all of it.

She is able to demonstrate that the collaborative relationship between the two men was far more extensive than most psychoanalysts had known. In some ways it may have resembled previous collaborations Freud had during other creative periods. Very likely it was complicated, perhaps essentially destroyed, by another attempt by Ferenczi to be analyzed by Freud during part of it. It is easy for us to see how difficult and perhaps impossible it is to frame off one kind relationship, that of the analytic situation, from another, that of friendship or family relationship. But it took painful experiences to learn many such things which we can now take for granted.

Going beyond the biographical interests and the additional access to Freud's creative functions, her essay is a beautiful exposition of a psychoanalytic way of thinking, first shown clearly and demonstrated by Freud, not only about clinical matters but about theories, not only about psychoanalysis but about all productive intellectual work which soars beyond mere classifications and abstractions. Grubrich-Simitis makes it clear how much Freud depended upon free communication intrapsychically; in illustrating this, she produces an eloquent argument to preserve the forms and functions of metapsychology, without freezing it into dogma or concretized metaphors. Freud was not only a psychological revolutionary, he was an epistemological revolutionary as well.

Finally, this small book is a contribution to the current arguments about psychoanalysis as a scientific enterprise, entwined with biological issues as much as it is entwined with the more general humanities, but maintaining an individuality of its own. Sulloway's insistence on seeing Freud as a biologist (1979), and the arguments against his viewpoints, along with the interests of individual scholars like Lucille Ritvo (1965, 1972), are alive. In my opinion, they will result neither in the "biologizing" of psychoanalysis nor dismissals of its resemblances to some of the other humanities, particularly history; they will lead us to retain the changing and metaphorical forms of the Witch metapsychology, rooted as it is in the life of the body and the brain as much as it is rooted in internal psychological experience. And it will do this without mixing the replaceable superstructure with the foundations: disciplined observations.

The book is satisfying and stimulating. An index might have been helpful, but in view of the brevity and condensation of the whole, an index might have been unwieldy. As it is, it will be useful to scholars, to historians of science, to epistemologists, to those of us interested in creativity in general—particularly in Freud's. It will be a major voice in the dialogues about the heuristic value of retaining a metapsychology. Most of all, it will show by example the virtues of minds that are open and flexible—yet skeptical. We all know that the more free we are to both fantasy and subject fantasy to rational criticism the more useful will be our work. Not merely a beautifully presented piece of curiosa, this little book is a challenge for any reader who is not trapped in literal-mindedness.

REFERENCES

RITVO, L. V. (1965). Darwin as the source of Freud's Neo-Lamarckianism. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn. 13:499-517.

RlTVO, L. V. (1972). Carl Claus as Freud's professor of the New Darwinian Biology. Int. J. Psychoanal. 53:277-283.

SULLOWAY, F. (1979). Freud. Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend. New York: Basic Books.