PSICANALISI. – It is a system of dynamic psychology, that is, one which studies especially the forces propelling and directing psychic activity, conceived and developed by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939).
At first it was merely an exploratory and therapeutic method for a certain category of nervous disorders. Subsequently it expanded into a genuine psychological system, interpreting subjective activities as originally produced by unconscious forces. A complete understanding of human nature must, according to p., take account, in addition to introspective and behavioral data, of other factors that cannot be directly observed, but only inferred from their effects, and which, while eluding awareness, actively influence conduct.
P. is connected with the French psychopathological school. Jean-Martin Charcot had set out to study the symptoms exhibited by hysterics during the state of hypnosis, which he regarded as closely connected with hysteria. At the same time Bernheim in Nancy was employing, with some success, suggestion in the hypnotic state to treat certain illnesses; and he thought that hypnosis, although varying in intensity according to the person who induced it and the person who underwent it, should be regarded as a normal condition for all human beings. After graduating, Freud studied for approximately one year in Paris at the Salpêtrière, under Charcot’s guidance; subsequently he also met Bernheim. Both Freud and one of Charcot’s most distinguished pupils, Pierre Janet, observed that not only in hysterics, but in almost all patients with functional nervous disorders (disorders in which it is impossible to discover an anatomical or physiological alteration), a fragmentation or disintegration of the mind takes place, whereby activities that collaborate harmoniously in the healthy person function independently and at times in conflict with one another. P. Janet thinks that this is due to the weakening of general psychological tension and the reassertion of automatisms, and that through hypnosis it is possible to restore the connection among the dissociated functions. Freud, on the other hand, maintains that the cause of the disintegration lies in an incompatibility between the dissociated activities and the rest of psychic activity, caused by unconscious forces. Therefore, only when the cause of the disorder is brought to the light of consciousness does the disorder itself disappear. Hence the cathartic method, that is, the recognition and elimination of the unconscious causes of disorders—a method that Freud described in a study of a famous case treated by Dr. Breuer and employed especially at the beginning of his psychoanalytic treatments.
The birth certificate of p. may be considered the publication of Studien über die Hysterie by Breuer and Freud in 1895. Freud then separated from Breuer and continued the work alone. Since hypnosis was not successful with all patients and in many cases gave the impression of going around an obstacle rather than overcoming it—because, once one symptom had ceased, another proliferated—Freud abandoned hypnosis and replaced it with the method of free associations. Retaining the premise of physiological relaxation (the subject lies comfortably on a couch, in a quiet and moderately illuminated environment), the instruction to enter hypnotic sleep was replaced by the injunction to say freely everything that passes through the mind, without worrying whether it is logically connected, whether it is important, or whether it is pleasant or unpleasant. Any voluntary control over one’s thoughts must be abandoned, and they must be allowed to manifest themselves as they arise. This is not always easy; and the analyst’s skill consists precisely in guiding the subject with great discretion and allowing the outpouring to flow. Freud gained the impression that there was something like a force actively opposing the return of the dissociated activities to consciousness. At first it seemed that the origin of the disorders was to be attributed to events that had aroused a strong and unpleasant emotion, and that the memory of the event had been repressed into the unconscious, from which, however, it continued to influence conduct. Subsequently Freud thought that the importance of these traumatic events lay in their stimulating certain desires or tendencies in conflict with the general direction of the personality; he maintained that these unconscious desires were of two kinds, aggressive and sexual, though with a great preponderance of the latter. Hence the major development that sexuality assumed in Freud’s conception.
In the study of dreams Freud found another path, indeed the main path, the “royal road,” as he called it, for the study of the unconscious. In his 1900 volume Traumdeutung he set out to show that dreams are the manifestation of unconscious desires in disguised form, so as to evade the forces that would drive them back into the unconscious; and that many typical features of neurotic symptoms appear in them. But other facts, too, can serve to explore the unconscious. In the two volumes Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens and Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten, published in 1904 and 1905, Freud asserts that the lapsus linguae et calami, clumsy acts, delays, forgetfulness, and daydreams, which to us would seem entirely fortuitous and without explanation,
are instead revealing of a hidden design; and that the same is true of jokes, witticisms, and “humour.”
In 1905, with the volume Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, he presented a theory of the development of the sexual instinct from a certain number of component instincts, connected with particular parts of the body, which at an initial stage would appear to be independent but would later merge into the sexual instinct. In the work Zu Einführung des Narzissismus, Freud complicated his description of psychosexual development by introducing, after the stage of autoeroticism, a narcissistic stage, in which the libido, having already organized the component instincts, turns toward the subject. Subsequent development requires passage from the narcissistic stage to that of object-love, directed toward either a person or a thing, in which a substantial part of the libido is sublimated—that is, diverted from a sexual outlet toward the various objects or activities of social and civic life. A critical moment in development is the Oedipus complex: the boy loves his mother and finds a rival in his father (the myth of Oedipus, who kills his father and marries his mother, expresses in terms of adult life the child’s desires). But, being unable to attain satisfaction of his desire, the libido seeks new objects that serve as substitutes for the one not obtained: the beloved woman, the school, the city, and so forth are the termini of feelings originally directed toward the mother; the teacher, the police officer, and the priest are objects of a mixture of feelings of love, admiration, respect, or hatred that had been directed toward the father. Thus Freud interprets the psychic activity of the adult as repressed infantile sexuality.
But what are the forces that bring about this repression? He answers this question in the work Das Ich und das Er of 1923. He divides the psyche into three principal parts: 1) the Er (a neuter demonstrative pronoun in German, translatable by the Latin Id), the unconscious in which instinctive forces operate; 2) the Ich (translatable by the Latin Ego), the conscious Ego, which expresses the tendencies of the Ego and puts them into practice, compatibly with circumstances; 3) the Super-ego, or moral conscience. The Super-ego is not preformed like the Id and the Ego, but arises from their antagonism around the fifth year of life; it consists largely of unconscious forces that turn back upon themselves, and in part undergo sublimation. At the boundary between the Id and the Ego operate repression, which removes certain conscious facts from the Ego and drives them into the Id, and censorship, which obstructs the reverse passage from the Id to the Ego. The fact that moral conscience is formed by the turning back upon themselves of tendencies directed outward accounts for its inflexibility and aggressiveness. Freud developed his doctrine with regard to the problems of civilization (Totem und Tabu, 1912; Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 1930) and religion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion, 1927; and Maus und Monotheism, 1939). In dealing with religious problems, although Freud displays genius in framing the facts within his doctrine, he arrived at rash and unfounded assertions; but, what is more serious, he showed no understanding whatsoever of the positive value of the religious fact.
Psychoanalysis, in Freud’s formulation, has not remained without criticism or dissent. As early as 1912, two pupils, Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung, broke away from him; others subsequently distanced themselves (Bleuler, Stekel), and today there are countless doctrines that describe themselves as psychoanalytic but are openly at variance with Freud’s psychoanalysis. Important developments took place in the United States through the work of F. Alexander, Karen Horney, and Carl Rogers. Here we shall briefly mention only the positions of Adler and Jung. The former attributes the role of driving force in psychic activity not so much to sexuality as to the “will to power,” the need to assert one’s individuality, and to the “community feeling,” the social need. The “feeling of inferiority,” which originates from both, impels one to overcome obstacles or seek compensations. Dreams express these fundamental tendencies: neurosis is their exacerbation in the inability to put them into practice. Jung gives libido a much broader meaning, including within it all vital impulses; and, in addition to the individual unconscious, he affirms the existence of a collective unconscious containing the “archetypes,” that is, the patterns of concepts and needs common to all humanity. Analysis must be carried out in order to discover aspirations for the future. Religion is not an illusion, as Freud defined it, but the most significant and ineradicable expression of psychic activity.
VALUATION. — A critical judgment of so broad a doctrine is not easy, although, amid the multiplicity of its aspects, it nevertheless follows a simple and decisive line. It may be observed that Freud’s exceptional capacity for concentrating on the study of a problem and for pursuing to the point of exasperation the interpretive threads that present themselves to him is reflected in the entire doctrinal construction, imparting to it a unitary, but also one-sided and closed, character. Starting from a rather limited field of observation (the study of psychoneuroses) and having established the active character of the Unconscious, p. turns to discovering the Unconscious in every form of psychic activity; similarly, having fixed the principle of libido and repression, it employs it to explain every human fact.
Hence the interpretive schematism, readily accessible even to laymen, which gives the impression of penetrating all the mysteries of earth and heaven. P., which, as a conception of life—that is, as a philosophy—bears a distinctly positivist and pessimistic stamp, nevertheless arouses easy enthusiasm, not only because it touches points particularly sensitive to human nature, but also because (contrary to what Freud taught and practised) it seems to justify a free conduct of life. Hence the passionate and excessive sympathies and reactions that it has aroused. The fact remains that, under Freud’s guidance, p. established and developed itself in almost complete isolation, both from experimental psychology and from the secessions that threatened its structure. It is interesting, however, that the secessionist schools themselves refer back to ideas that Freud himself expressed but did not develop. Here too it becomes apparent that one-sidedness is both the merit and the weak point of Freud’s conception. Among its most serious deficiencies is the excessive importance attributed to sexuality at the expense of other forces also deeply rooted in human activity; the purely formal aspect of moral consciousness; the indiscriminate use of pathological terms in describing both abnormal and normal facts; the enigma of a sublimation that gives rise to the most contrasting and qualitatively diverse activities and that, moreover, takes place in the Unconscious; and its sometimes hostile indifference to religious fact. Another defect of p. should be noted: its attribution to certain facts of an interpretation that goes beyond the bare datum. The result is the difficulty of separating fact from interpretation. Perhaps this is why little progress has been made in the experimental control of many psychoanalytic assertions. But this also makes it difficult to distinguish what may be regarded as acquired knowledge from what is doctrinal superstructure.
As regards the methods of investigation introduced by p., the difficulty is not so serious. One may therefore, with Dalbiez, distinguish between doctrine and method, each to be evaluated within its own sphere. If psychoanalytic doctrine as a whole may be judged neither definitive nor satisfactory, and if it is unacceptable in its philosophical developments, this does not rule out the possibility of accepting and using psychoanalytic methods (free association, the study of dreams, projective methods). But this already means breaking the unity of Freud’s system. On the other hand, p. must be credited with having posed the problem of the Unconscious and with having boldly opened certain paths for exploring it; with having given psychic processes a “dynamic” orientation; and with having highlighted the enormous importance of affectivity within them.
As regards the therapeutic applications that go under the generic name of p., despite employing highly diverse criteria, one remains perplexed in the face of the successes claimed by the various schools. This would seem to indicate that the therapeutic value of treatment is independent of the doctrinal principle inspiring it, and that its mode of action is therefore extremely obscure. Psychoanalytic treatment is not something to be undertaken lightly. “The patient’s medical and psychotherapeutic interest,” says the Supreme Pontiff Pio XII, “here encounters a moral limit. It has not been proved, and is even inaccurate, that the pansexual method of a certain school of psychoanalysis is an indispensable integral part of every serious psychotherapy worthy of the name; that neglecting this method in the past caused serious psychological harm and errors in doctrine and in applications in education, psychotherapy, and even more so in pastoral work; that it is urgent to remedy this deficiency and to initiate all those concerned with psychological questions into the guiding ideas and, if necessary, even into the practical handling of this technique of sexuality” (Address of His Holiness Pio XII to the First International Congress of Histopathology of the Nervous System, in L'Osserv. Rom., 17 Sept. 1952, col. 4).
Indeed, the soul of the child is always comparable to soft wax, upon which impressions, and especially certain determinate and more compelling impressions, such as those concerning sexuality, are stamped so deeply that one can never be sufficiently cautious not to make children witnesses, interlocutors, or readers of certain subjects. This is a common rule of every method of education, even when dealing with normal subjects. Now, probing the soul of a child or adolescent (who, on the assumption that psychotherapeutic treatment is necessary, is already in himself inclined toward hypereroticism) with inappropriate, often crude questions about everything concerning the «libido», the first eruption of the passions, the first defeats and subsequent relapses accompanied by a description of the circumstances of surroundings and companionship, the analysis of images and dreams concerning all that modesty would not wish to reveal, and bringing to light tendencies perhaps still hidden—these things cannot fail to make the blood run cold in the veins of every honest and conscientious educator. This is all the more so because, on the one hand, instead of basing himself on a true and reasoned understanding of the state of mind of the child or adolescent before him, the psychoanalyst bases himself on a one-sided interpretation of his doctrines, which reduce everything to sexuality; and, on the other hand, the images and ideas concerning the «libido» possess such a powerful dynamism that they intensify the violence of the passions. For this reason, serious and experienced psychologists warn against the p. of children, in which one may easily run the risk of suggesting things to which the subject would never have arrived, or of obscuring and irreparably destroying his healthy, serene, and precious innocence (cf. Discorso di S. S. Pio XII, ibid., col. 4).
Nor is it valid to compare psychoanalytic treatment with the sacramental Confession of the Catholic Church, or with the confidential confession made to a trusted person, to whom one may disclose one’s crises, even the most humiliating, and one’s doubts in order to obtain relief, comfort, and a word of encouragement. For confidentially or sacramentally revealing uncertainties, struggles, and defeats to a trusted person is not the same as subtly investigating and bringing to light what offends natural modesty and what one would not wish to disclose in that manner and under those circumstances. Moreover, the value of sacramental Confession consists not merely in the removal of a burden weighing upon the conscience, obtained through the purely verbal manifestation and recounting of one’s faults, but in the necessary presence of repentance and resolution, and above all in the divine efficacy of the words of absolution, which restore Grace to the soul.