Gmail kac attac Webster—Freud, part III kac attac Sat, Sep 30, 2023 at 9:00 PM To: Stefan Kac III PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE TWENTY-ONE Psychoanalysis, Science and Human Nature 'THE OPINION IS GAINING GROUND,' Peter Medawar has written, "that doctrinaire psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellec- tual confidence trick of the twentieth century: and a terminal product as well - something akin to a dinosaur or a zeppelin in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design and with no pos- terity." These words express what is perhaps the most dismissive and contemptuous verdict on psychoanalysis which has ever been passed. It is the kind of verdict towards which the view of Freud I have offered here might seem logically to lead. But although Medawar's conclusion that psychoanalytic theory is a 'structure of radically unsound design' is eminently reasonable, I believe it would be wrong to accept his judgement in its entirety. In the first place psychoanalysis cannot fairly be described as a 'confidence trick'. For this description quite clearly implies a conscious and deliberate attempt to deceive. Although the image of Freud as an arch-deceiver has been favoured by some recent critics of psychoanaly- sis, it seems to misrepresent both Freud's own character and that of his followers. For, whatever his moral failings and his sometimes less than scrupulous attitude towards the truth, Freud sought to persuade others to accept psychoanalysis for no other reason than that he believed in it himself. Psychoanalytic theory is no more a confidence trick than Christianity, Islam, Judaism or any other system of religious belief. What may seem more plausible is Medawar's claim that psychoan- alysis should be seen as a 'terminal product ... with no posterity. In one respect at least, this charge seems just. So far as Freud himself is concerned, the evidence which I have presented must, I believe, lead to an overwhelmingly negative estimate of his actual scientific achieve- 437 438 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE ment. Freud made no substantial intellectual discoveries. He was the creator of a complex pseudo-science which should be recognised as one of the great follies of Western civilisation. In creating his particular pseudo-science, Freud developed an autocratic, anti-empirical intellec- tual style which has contributed immeasurably to the intellectual ills of our own era. His original theoretical system, his habits of thought and his entire attitude to scientific research are so far removed from any responsible method of inquiry that no intellectual approach basing itself upon these is likely to endure. Still less is it likely to solve the enigma of human nature which Freud himself believed he had within his grasp. Yet, having said all this, we are still not in a position to endorse Medawar's prediction that psychoanalysis is likely to have no posterity. Indeed to underwrite this view would be to take a very considerable risk. We have only to consult the history of science to recognise that false theories can sometimes play a key role in scientific progress and that failure to recognise this may actually impede such progress. One of the most significant examples offered by the history of sci- ence concerns the role played by astrology. For although the intellec- tual foundations of astrology were originally entirely without substance, a few empirically minded and sceptical astrologers always recognised that their system was in need both of verification and refinement. Towards the end of the seventeenth century the astrologer John Goad kept a thirty-year record of the observations he had made of the supposed influence of the planets on weather and epidemics. In the course of his investigations he noted, probably for the first time in human history, the seasonal variation in suicide rates. He thus observed a real sociological phenomenon for which there is still no entirely satisfactory explanation.? The failure of some conventional scientists to recognise that astrol- ogers were not immune to making real discoveries played an extremely significant role in the history of science at the beginning of the seven- tenth century. Because Copernicus was an astrologer, his conjecture that the tides were influenced by the moon was scornfully rejected by Galileo, who persisted in his erroneous view that tides were caused by the earth moving around the sun.' Astrology is by no means the only falsé theory which has helped to generate real discoveries. We should perhaps recall that the phlogiston theory played a quite crucial role in the development of modern chemistry. This theory maintained that in the process of combustion, PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND HUMAN NATURE 430 phlogiston, a hypothetical element, was separated out from every com- bustible material. Although the theory was incorrect it was not scien- rifically barren. For it was by analysing carefully the mistaken observations on which this theory was based that later scientists were led eventually to the discovery of oxygen. It was Lavoisier's oxygen theory of combustion which eventually led to a reformulation of chem- istry so vast that it is usually known as 'the chemical revolution' * it is because scientific discoveries are sometimes the product of a process of fruitful error that we would do well to draw back from Medawar's confident assertion that psychoanalysis is a 'terminal idea with no posterity'. This does not mean that we should credit Freud with insights which he did not have or that we should attribute to him an intellectual subversiveness which was never realised in his theories. For as I have tried to show in this book, many of Freud's ostensible victories over the repressive forces of the Judaeo-Christian tradition were hollow or illusory. But one of the greatest mistakes we can make in assessing any messianic movement is that of automatically convicting its members of the follies and failings of their leader. It is part of the very nature of messianic prophets that they tend to overvalue their own putative insights, theories and beliefs, while simultaneously undervaluing the insights and wisdom of others. If we make use of a critique of Freud's own theories in order to ridicule or dismiss the work of all those who have ever invoked Freud's name, we merely end by perpetuating the tyrannical self-estimate of the prophet we purport to criticise. The fact that almost all psychoanalysts have hugely overvalued Freud's theories, and that some, such as Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan, have sunk even deeper into epistemological quicksands than Freud himself, does not mean that we can safely reject the work of every psychoanalyst as being without value." For to do this would be to risk making exactly the kind of mistake that Galileo made when he rejected the Copernican theory of lunar tides. Scientific ideas should be judged not by their intellectual provenance but by their explanatory power. As I have already argued in the Introduction, a small but sig- nificant number of those who have worked within the psychoanalytic tradition have left it much richer than they found it and have added appreciably to the sum of our psychological knowledge. Peter Medawar's assessment of psychoanalysis does not recognise this. The danger of such sweeping and contemptuous judgements is that they play into the hands of those who are hostile to all forms of 440 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE deep psychological explanation and who seek to discredit or discount not simply psychoanalysis, but all forms of psychotherapy. It is because Peter Medawar's verdict on psychoanalysis might be construed as underwriting such an attitude that I have taken issue with it here at such length. For Medawar's view seems all too like that of the scientist who, because he is dissatisfied with the phlogiston theory, decides to deny the reality of the phenomenon of combustion. The task of the scientist is not to deride or destroy unsatisfactory scientific theories, but to analyse carefully why these theories do not work and then to replace them by theories which do. To say this is not to deny the value of purely negative critiques of psychoanalysis. It is merely to emphasise that no critique of an inad- equate scientific theory, including the one I have offered here, can ever be regarded as a complete refutation of that theory. In practice science proceeds not by dismantling old hypotheses and then erecting new ones in their place, but by using new hypotheses to displace old ones. This much should be apparent from even a cursory acquaintance with the history of science. The point has been underlined, however, by Thomas Kuhn in his discussion of theories which achieve paradigmatic status: Once it has achieved the status of a paradigm, a scientific theory is declared invalid only if an alternate candidate is available to take its place. No process yet disclosed by the historical study of scientific devel- opment at all resembles the methodological stereotype of falsification by direct comparison with nature. That remark does not mean that scientists do not reject scientific theories, or that experience and experi- ment are not essential to the process in which they do so. But it does mean - what will ultimately be a central point - that the act of judgment which leads scientists to reject a previously accepted theory is always based on more than a comparison of that theory with the world. The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other.' The proposition that psychoanalysis is a theory of human nature that can be refuted only by putting in its place a better theory may seem straightforward. Western intellectual history, however, suggests that this proposition is fraught with difficulties. There is clearly a very significant difference between theories of combustion and theories of human nature. During the history of modern science the need for a PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND HUMAN NATURE 44I theory of combustion, and the intellectual legitimacy of attempting to construct such a theory, have never been at issue. Yet throughout the same period the very possibility of constructing a theory of human nature has frequently been either dismissed or surrounded with intel- lectual taboos. It is partly because of the depth of our cultural and intellectual confusion about this issue that psychoanalysis, itself a product of the same confusion, has survived as long as it has. If we wish to understand why scepticism about Freudian theory has not triumphed sooner, we need to examine some of the reasons why our intellectual culture is itself so sceptical about the kind of large-scale theories which alone might serve to displace psychoanalysis. There are a number of apparently different grounds on which such scepticism is based. Perhaps the most common argument derives from the traditional view of science which sees it as being concerned above all to illuminate the structure of matter or of non-human nature. According to this view science is simply not the kind of enterprise which can be legitimately focused on the problem of human nature. One of the most recent and influential statements of this position has been made by Peter Medawar himself. In his essay The Limits of Science Medawar sets forward his own view that the greatest glory of science is that 'there is no limit upon the power of science to answer questions of the kind science can answer.' But he simultaneously advances the view that there are a number of crucial questions which science is unable to answer and which 'no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer.' These questions are characterised by Medawar as the 'childlike elementary questions having to do with first and last things - questions such as "How did everything begin?" "What are we all here for?" «What is the point of living?" He goes on to suggest that, while science should concern itself with answering material ques- tions, it is right and proper that, when it comes to 'the ultimate ques- tions' we should seek 'transcendent' answers which 'belong to the domains of myth, metaphysics, imaginative literature or religion'. While making it clear that he does not himself believe in God something which he regrets - Medawar openly suggests that, in the case of the great mysteries of human existence, 'religious explanations are by far the best' even though accepting this entails what he calls'a momentary abdication of the rule of reason'. In his view the acceptabil- ity of transcendent answers is ultimately to be measured not by their explanatory power but by the degree to which they bring peace of mind' 7 442 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE Medawar's agnostic willingness to lean on the hypothesis of God is interesting and, in one respect at least, refreshingly honest. For the position which he states quite openly is very often held covertly or surreptitiously by rationalist thinkers. It is the position which might be called 'reversible rationalism', in which a scientific attitude towards nature co-exists with a transcendental, or superstitious, attitude towards human nature. The reason Medawar is able to put forward this apparently self- contradictory view with scarcely a note of apology or explanation is that 'reversible rationalism' is deeply rooted in our intellectual culture, and might indeed be characterised as one of its central orthodoxies. For when the creators of modern science laid the foundations of physics in the seventeenth century the rational empiricism which underlay their approach to the realm of matter was itself derived from creationist doctrines. Descartes, Galileo, Newton and Robert Boyle, to name but four representative figures, all believed that they had triumphantly succeeded through their science in bearing witness to the majesty and rationality of God. But although they believed that the mystery of the rational design of matter and of the physical universe was theirs to unlock, they sometimes openly recognised that the ultimate mysteries of human nature were known to God alone and would be revealed only when the apocalyptic moment finally came. The orthodox position of reversible rationalism, which was held in its most extreme form by Descartes, was implicitly maintained by the Christian instigators of the scientific revolution. It was challenged but never entirely dislodged by the most extreme forms of Enlightenment rationalism, and has repeatedly been reasserted in modern times. One of the most interest- ing twentieth-century instances is that provided by Alfred Wallace, who formulated a theory of natural selection at the same time as Darwin. Wallace eventually took the view that, while the theory could account for evolution in general, it could not be invoked to explain the human mind, whose mysteries compelled one to postulate the existence of God - or of a world spirit working above and beyond the material world.& Medawar's seemingly contemptuous dismissal of psychoanalysis is evidently conditioned, in part at least, by his own allegiance to the orthodox position, and his belief that any theory which seeks to address the deepest problems of human existence is treading beyond the proper sphere of science and trespassing upon the preserve of religion or myth. What is odd about his position is not that it should be held at PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND HUMAN NATURE 443 all, but that such an explicitly God-centred view should be seriously entertained by a thinker who simultaneously disavows belief in the God his philosophical position compels him to postulate. It is partly in order to avoid this kind of logical muddle that another version of 'reversible rationalism' has gradually emerged among liberal intellectuals during the second half of the twentieth century in the philosophy of 'pluralism'. Like the traditional version it implicitly accepts the legitimacy of scientific theories about the realm of matter. But whereas the traditional view renounces only scientific or materialist theories of human nature, and upholds theological ones, the modern liberal humanist adaptation of it implicitly renounces all theories of human nature whether of a transcendent or non-transcendent kind. The theism of the traditional position is thus replaced by scepticism about the very possibility of putting forward any acceptable account of human nature. The factor which has shaped this distinctively modern form of scep- ticism, with its particular distrust of any form of messianic politics, is nothing other than the course of modern European history. The cru- cal moment which liberal pluralism simultaneously celebrates and recoils from is the rise of Enlightenment rationalism in eighteenth- century France. For although the most influential proponent of modern liberal pluralism, Isaiah Berlin, is sometimes mistakenly seen as an opponent of rationalism, he has described himself as 'a liberal rationalist' and is fundamentally sympathetic to the values of the Enlightenment. In his orthodox rationalist view Diderot, Helvétius, Holbach, Condorcet, and above all Voltaire, were the great liberators of European humanity. 'They liberated people from horrors, obscuran- tism, fanaticism, monstrous views. They were against cruelty, they were against oppression, they fought the good fight against superstition and ignorance and against a great many things which ruined people's lives. So I am on their side.' At the same time that he endorses the values of the Enlightenment, however, Berlin is painfully aware that the very form of rationalism which set out to deliver Europe from tyranny was itself potentially tyrannical. What he implicitly recognises is that the attempt to overthrow the traditional attitude of 'reversible rationalism' and to make human nature itself into the object of rigor- ous, coldly rational scientific analysis, contained the seeds of moral disaster on an unimaginable scale. For until the rise of scientific atheism in eighteenth-century France human beings had effectively been pro- tected against the cruel astringency of Christian rationalism by nothing 444 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE other than Christianity itself and its belief in the distinctive reality of the human soul. With the rise of atheistical rationalism, human nature was stripped of its divinity and began to be regarded by the most thorough- going rationalists as a suitable object for exactly the same kind of abstrac- tionist analysis that had hitherto been applied only to dead matter. The search began for the laws of human nature - the rigid invariant laws which, if only human beings could be brought into conformity with them, would usher in the perfect society where all would live in peace, brotherhood and equality. Again and again in his essays Berlin points to the dangers of this approach. One of his axiomatic beliefs, which is also found in many forms of modern liberal pluralism, is succinctly expressed in a passage in his essay on Moses Hess: A sense of symmetry and regularity, and a gift for rigorous deduction, that are prerequisites of aptitude for some natural sciences, will, in the field of social organisation, unless they are modified by a great deal of sensibility, understanding and humanity, inevitably lead to appalling bullying on one side and untold suffering on the other. The tragic truth contained within these words was demonstrated again and again in the great human 'experiments' which were carried out in the name of a rational scientific view of human nature in modern Europe. Two of these experiments were particularly significant. In the French Revolution, and once again in the Russian Revolution of 1917, a rigid, scientific, utopian quest for social perfection, launched amidst dreams of ultimate harmony, ended on both occasions in blood, terror and tyrannical repression. It would be difficult to overstate the influence exercised by these tragic excursions into revolutionary faith, culminating as they did in the Terror of Lenin and the Great Terror of Stalin, on the manner in which twentieth-century intellectuals have perceived and assessed modern attempts to formulate theories of human nature. For obvious reasons it has been those intellectuals who belong to the same genera- tion as Isaiah Berlin who have been most deeply and most traumatically aftected. For many years, until the advent of structuralism, post- structuralism and other linguistically based philosophies, the dominant ethos in a number of British and American universities was that of pluralism - a pluralism whose character was deeply marked by the writings of Berlin himself and his intellectual contemporaries. The doctrine of pluralism rests on one central negative premise, namely PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND HUMAN NATURE 445 that 'there is no single answer'. The enemies of the pluralist are, in the words of Isaiah Berlin, the 'terrible simplifiers', They are the 'great despotic organisers', single-minded monists, ruthless fanatics, men possessed by an all embracing vision'. The pluralist rejects such single- mindedness in favour of wide intellectual tolerance and a belief that intellectual diversity is intrinsically valuable. In this defence of diversity what is held to be at stake is political freedom, for 'dogmatists who claim to know the certain answer will become tyrants'. The equation at its simplest is thus one between intellectual system-building and totalitarianism. The ultimate dread is not of any merely theoretical dogmatism but of the terrible practical dogmatism of Hitler and Stalin. 10 In an extremely significant intellectual genealogy, it would seem that this dread has been passed down directly by thinkers such as Isaiah Berlin to some of the recent advocates of postmodernism. Gilbert Adair, for example, has put forward the view that 'every "ism" , as the world has learnt to its cost, eventually degenerates into a terrorism. Detecting a new estrangement from Freud, he sees this 'as only part of a growing antipathy to all totalising doctrines, all grand master-texts. (Totalising sounds too much to our 20th century ears like totalitarian and master-text has a slightly queasy echo of master race.)' Adair goes on to suggest that 'postmodernism is less a genuine doctrine than a ruefully ironic recognition that the doctrinal era has passed. The postmodernist thinker is one who accepts, as perhaps Marx and Freud could not, that his ideas are of a basically interim nature, destined, often much sooner than expected, to be rendered obsolete."I In assessing such scepticism about large-scale theories of human nature, we should recognise that the dangers against which pluralists warn are real. It must indeed be suggested that intellectual totalitarian- ism is not simply an aberration from our central intellectual tradition but a pattern which recurs with such regularity that it appears to be a normal phenomenon rather than an abnormal one - one which is perhaps endemic in any culture which has been shaped by monotheism. From Aquinas to Marx, from Plato to Lévi-Strauss, our intellectual culture has again and again demonstrated a seeming predilection for global, theory-centred doctrines of human nature in which empirical evidence has been either ignored or eclipsed. Lest there should be any doubt about the continuing appeal of such over-arching doctrines, the doubt. example of psychoanalysis itself should be sufficient to dispel such 446 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE The problem both with the traditional kind of 'reversible rational- ism' preached by Medawar, and with pluralist adaptations of this pos- ition, is not that the dangers against which they warn are illusory. The real problem is that while the liberal pluralist position involves an ideological elision, the traditional position, as put forward by Medawar, is a cultural anachronism. One version of the liberal position which bears directly on psychoan- alysis, while simultaneously illustrating the ideological elision of which I speak, has been put forward by Frederick Crews in his volume of essays, Skeptical Engagements. Astute, pungent, and often extremely perceptive, Crews' essays are examples of modern rational empiricism at its most brilliant. His trenchant analyses of structuralist and post- structuralist trends and his many attacks on psychoanalysis are charged with the kind of energy which can only be sustained by a direct current of genuine insights. But, like many liberal intellectuals, Crews is at his most effective when he is disengaging himself from established beliefs, and he shows little enthusiasm for the project of replacing such beliefs with any new, systematic theory of human nature. In this respect it is significant that, in the introduction to Skeptical Engagements, Crews implicitly defines both Marxism and psychoanaly- sis as intellectual drugs, and implicitly holds out as an ideal the intellec- tual who has conquered 'the fear of facing the world without an intellectual narcotic ready at hand'. My equipment for understanding the power of that fear was acquired the hard way, through trying to work myself free of a seductive dogma that had promised quick, deep knowledge. For a decade or so I was convinced that psychoanalysis, with its distrust of appearances and its stoic willingness to face the unspeakable, was a useful adjunct to my skeptical principles. Only in halting stages did I come to reverse that opinion and acknowledge that Freudianism is a faith like any other . This experience of conversion followed by self-deprogramming explains why psychoanalysis occupies a central place in Skeptical Engagements . Freudianism has become for me the paradigmatic example of a doctrine that compels irrational loyalty.I The implication of these words is that Crews holds no faith, that he has passed entirely beyond the need for doctrines which compel irrational loyalty, and that he has triumphed over the most characteristic need of intellectuals - the need for certainty. Given Crews's tone, at once PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND HUMAN NATURE 447 reasonable and rigorous, there would seem to be no grounds for doubt- ing his own scepticism. 'Yet if we are to meet Crews' robust scepticism with scepticism of our own, it is precisely this kind of doubt which we must entertain. For the belief that we have freed ourselves from irrational faiths is, historically, one of the most dangerous of all beliefs. It is, indeed, just this belief which lies at the heart of Marxism and psychoanalysis themselves. What Marxism and psychoanalysis both illustrate is not that revolutionary ideologies are dangerous. What they illustrate is that orthodoxies are dangerous - particularly in the hands of those who believe they have transcended them. One of my main purposes in writing this book has been to explore this predicament. What I have tried to show is how powerful the creationist assumptions of Judaeo-Christian irrationalism are and how deeply we have internalised them. It is because, as a culture, we have theorised about our own nature more extensively, more deeply and more pervasively than we usually admit to ourselves, and because our theories have achieved the invisi- bility of orthodoxy, that the sceptical withdrawal from ideology which is preached by many liberal intellectuals should itself be treated with scepticism. For what it means, in effect, is that most disavowals of belief are, in reality, nothing other than tacit proclamations of faith. This view might well be applied to the position adopted by Frederick Crews. It is interesting in this respect that, by the end of the very introduction in which he implicitly renounces all forms of irrational faith, he makes it clear that his own position assumes the presence rather than the absence of belief, and that it rests, if not on any cer- tainty, at least upon a degree of "assurance', "'My own starting point,' he writes, 'is an acknowledgement that we do, by now, know a great many things with enough assurance to profit from their conse- quences."* The claim is a moderate one indeed, and, given its non- specific nature, difficult to challenge. In the context of this discussion, however, it should be clear that the great danger of taking such a position, particularly when it is combined, as it is by Crews, with a seemingly uncritical celebration of 'empiricism' and "common sense' is that the apparently inert white powder of the particular kind of empiricism and common sense which is favoured might turn out, in reality, to be nothing other than the pure opium of orthodoxy. It might seem that by saying this - and in particular by expressing scepticism about the tradition of scientific empiricism to which modern 448 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE liberal humanists frequently appeal - I am implicitly rejecting both science and empiricism. I should therefore emphasise that I am not doing anything of the kind. As should be clear from the criticisms which have been made of Freud throughout this book, I believe that an empirical approach is a prerequisite of genuine science and, indeed, that empiricism is perhaps the most valuable element in the entire intellectual tradition of the West. Nevertheless I am suggesting that, if scepticism is to serve us well, we must be consistent about the manner in which we apply it, and we must interrogate our own tradition of scientific empiricism just as carefully and just as critically as we do the more obvious vehicles of ideology or cultural orthodoxy. Above all we must be wary of the possibility that the irrational faith we believe we have renounced might be secreted in the very mode of knowledge which claims to have passed beyond religious unreason. For just as there can be no genuine theoretical science without empiricism, so there can be no empiricism which is independent of theoretical assumptions or presuppositions. Although we sometimes see Western science as being founded on empiricism pure and simple, such a view seriously misrepresents intellectual history. For the most powerful intellectual ideology in Western culture from the time of Plato to the time of Descartes and beyond is almost entirely indepen- dent of empirical attitudes, and in some cases actively hostile to them. It is this ideology - the ideology of rationalism - which has dominated our intellectual culture for more than two millennia and continues to shape and determine the particular kind of 'empiricism' which is associated with the research we deem scientific. For modern science is not simply a neutral, value-free technique for assembling knowledge which can be treated as historically and ideologically innocent. While science is by no means monolithic, there are many who would suggest that its dominating ethos remains actively hostile to any theory of human nature which seeks to accommodate the full emotional depth and complexity of the human personality. "Scientific objectivity,' Ted Hughes has written, has its own morality and this is the prevailing morality of our time. It is a morality utterly devoid of any awareness of the requirements of the inner world. It is contemptuous of the 'human element'. This is its purity and its strength. The prevailing philosophies of our time sub- scribe to this contempt with a nearly religious fanaticism, just as science itself does. It PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND HUMAN NATURE 449 The words of Ted Hughes, with their stress on the 'puritanism' of science, might well serve to remind us of one of the many aspects of our cultural history which we now have difficulty in acknowledging. For, as the tradition of 'reversible rationalism' itself illustrates, the commonly held view that science grew up in opposition to religion is a myth. The tradition of scientific research goes back to the Greeks and beyond. But what we now know as modern science was born in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe. What took place at this time was a scientific revolution. Twentieth-century physicists such as Planck, Einstein and Bohr have modified the course of this revolution but they have not undone it or made Newtonian science obsolete. As historians of science have recognised, however, 'the classical-modern science built up from Copernicus to Newton made most of ancient and medieval science null and void.'I In historical reality as opposed to cultural myth this revolution was carried through almost exclusively by zealous Christians who were seeking not to escape their faith but to confirm and magnify it. As a few historians and sociologists have long recognised there was a particularly close association between Puri- tanism and the emergence of the modern scientific method. The Puritan idealisation of reason, which was itself a secularised transfor- mation of the form of rational asceticism worked out during the Middle Ages in the great monasteries of the West, depended crucially on an act of renunciation. It depended above all on the Puritan view that it is not simply pleasure or sexual temptation which may distract the mind of the Christian from God but ordinary human affections. The duty of the Puritan was to control such affections rigorously and never to allow them to usurp the controlling power of the rational soul. To be ensnared in the world of human relationships was itself to succumb to the realm of the flesh, which was imagined as unclean. To rise above this world, and to be able to hold in spiritual contempt the emotions engendered by it, was the only route to redemption, Both our contemporary intellectual culture, and our political cul- ture, remain deeply marked by the legacy of seventeenth-century Puri- tan rationalism. For the invisible ethical medium of all modern Western capitalist societies is a profound ideological hostility towards all those who proclaim the value of community, of co-operation or of intimate human relationships as opposed to economic individualism. The abstractionist, impersonal ethos of science is, as Ted Hughes suggests, one of the chief vehicles of this ideology. 450 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE It is because of the enduring association between the ethos of science and puritanical rationalism that we would do well to be wary of cultural critics who appeal unsceptically to the tradition of scientific empiricism as a remedy for our contemporary intellectual ills. Many intellectuals are sympathetic to the psychoanalytic tradition precisely because they distrust the rationalistic epistemology of orthodox science. They regard this epistemology as being intrinsically hostile to affectivity and therefore inimical to any recognition of the complexity of human behaviour and human motives. Nor should we assume that this kind of distrust is felt only by those who are not scientists themselves. In this respect we should recognise that the traditional version of 'reversible rationalism' expounded by the scientist Peter Medawar is very close to the critique of science offered recently by the non-scientist Bryan Appleyard. For both these very different thinkers implicitly see science as hostile to the human soul and seek to confine it to the realm of matter.'7 Very frequently those who dismiss such caution out of hand do so because they do not understand the intellectual power of science and are consequently less concerned to guard against its abuse. It is perhaps significant that one of the most powerful critiques of the false science associated with post-structuralist literary criticism has been made not by a literary critic but by a professor of medicine, Raymond Tallis. And it is in a book written jointly by two professors of mathe- matics, Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, that we may find some of the most perceptive, imaginative and morally alert discussions of the dangers of mathematics. In an essay entitled 'Loss of Meaning through Intellectual Processes: Mathematical Abstraction', they offer a warning which should be widely heeded: Whenever anyone writes down an equation that explicitly or implicitly alludes to an individual or a group of individuals, whether this be in economics, sociology, psychology, medicine, politics, demography, or military affairs, the possibility of dehumanisation exists. Whenever we use computerisation to proceed from formulas and algorithms to policy and to actions affecting humans, we stand open to good and to evil on a massive scale. What is not often pointed out is that this dehumanisation is intrinsic to the fundamental intellectual processes that are inherent in mathe- matics,18 Historically speaking, awareness by scientists of the dangers which mathematical and scientific abstractions can pose to human beings and to human societies is not unusual and it is partly because of this that PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND HUMAN NATURE 451 the traditional version of 'reversible rationalism' outlined by Medawar still has considerable cultural currency. To express this kind of caution about science and the dangers of ration- alism is to come very close in some respects to the position of Isaiah Berlin. Yet if we are to place his particular version of pluralism in perspective it is essential to recognise that Berlin himself was never able to step outside the magic circle of that rationalism whose destruc- tive spell he attempted to anatomise. His critique of rationalism is offered, as we have seen, not as a way of challenging the values of the Enlightenment but as a kind of apologia for its excesses. It is as though Berlin believes that if repeated warnings are given about how sharp, how dangerous and how murderous the sword of rationalism has proved to be during the last two centuries, then the great rationalist enterprise may after all be redeemed from its bloody and tyrannical past and set upon a more constructive course in the future. Once again we are brought face to face with the ideological elision which lies at the heart of modern liberal pluralism. For just as Frederick Crews tacitly endorses both the values and the ethos of modern science, so Isaiah Berlin underwrites the very ideology which he so sceptically and so brilliantly interrogates. The liberal pluralism he has so influentially expounded, which sets its face with such determination against every kind of all-embracing ideology, proves, if we only pause to inspect it closely, to be conceived as a kind of distraught defence of one of the largest and most all-embracing ideologies in the whole of human history - Enlightenment rationalism itself. To make this recognition should not prevent us from simultaneously recognising the immensely valuable contribution which both Crews and Berlin, in their very different ways, have made to the critical evaluation of modern ideologies. We should also recognise, I believe, that Frederick Crew's assumption that human nature can and should be treated as a proper subject for scientific investigation is more in tune with the contemporary Zeitgeist than either the traditional doctrine of reversible rationalism' or Berlin's particular version of pluralism. For the belief that science has a proper sphere within which alone it may legitimately work, and that this sphere excludes human nature, is a cultural anachronism. This argument is anachronistic for the very simple reason that it is based on an assumption about the nature of modern science which, while it was originally sound, and while it held good (against considerable opposition) throughout the seventeenth and 452 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE eighteenth centuries, collapsed in the middle of the nineteenth century with the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species. Until that time the notion that science did have limits, and that the great questions of human existence would always be excluded from its realm of jurisdic- tion, remained both coherent and plausible even though it was opposed by some Enlightenment rationalists. Only with the publication of Darwin's theory of human origins were the foundations of the tra- ditional argument finally destroyed by science itself. Nor were some of Darwin's own followers unaware of the long-term implications of his work. Reviewing The Origin of Species in 1860, in terms which we might well consider ominously and revealingly militant, T. H. Huxley hailed it as a 'Whitworth gun in the armoury of liberalism' and looked forward to 'the domination of Science' over 'regions of thought into which she has, as yet, hardly penetrated'."' It should be noted that two of Darwin's greatest admirers, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, were among the many nineteenth-century thinkers who sought to carry forward the revolution which Huxley both prophesied and proselytised. The momentous nature of the Darwinian revolution and the unprecedented scale of the intellectual upheaval which it brought about can perhaps best be judged by the evident difficulty which many Western intellectuals have had in reconciling themselves to the fact that it has taken place at all. The predicament of many liberal intellec- tuals in this respect is analogous to that of a hypothetical group of Russian aristocrats who, even in the latter part of the twentieth century, cannot bring themselves to believe in the reality of the 1917 Revolution and insist on constructing their world-view on the assumption that the Tsar is still in power. The anachronistic assumption that science has agreed limits, and that the ultimate questions of human existence lie beyond these limits, signifies the persistence of an illusion which is just as far removed from historical reality. It is especially fascinating that Peter Medawar, himself a distinguished biologist, should have resisted the implications of the Darwinian biological revolution so steadfastly. In his The Limits of Science Medawar writes of what he calls "the ultimate questions' of human existence that 'whatever else may be in dispute, it would be universally agreed that it is not to science that we should look for answers' (italics added).20 We should recall that the three examples of 'ultimate questions' given by Medawar are: 'How did everything begin?', What are we all here for?', and What is the point of living?' These, writes Medawar, 'are the questions that PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND HUMAN NATURE 453 children ask." For confirmation that the 'universal agreement' spoken of by Medawar is an illusion, we have only to consult the work of one of the most prominent, lucid and influential exponents of Darwinian theory among modern biologists, Richard Dawkins. The first chapter of his The Selfish Gene (which appeared six years before Medawar's essay) bears the title Why are people?' The chapter begins with the following paragraph: Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit carth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilisation, is: 'Have they discovered evolution yet?' Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin. To be fair, others had had inklings of the truth, but it was Darwin who first put together a coherent and tenable account of why we exist. Darwin made it possible for us to give a sensible answer to the curious child whose question heads this chapter. We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? After posing the last of these questions, the eminent zoologist G. C. Simpson put it thus: 'The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely' [italics added],?2 Dawkins goes on to make a very similar point to the one I have already made, observing that although the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun, 'the full implications of Darwin's revolution have yet to be widely realized ... Philosophy and the subjects known as "humanities" are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived.'23 It is not only modern biology which has crossed the traditional frontiers of science. In his A Brief History of Time Stephen Hawking has offered cosmological physics as a way of answering the 'ultimate questions'. He suggests that, once a complete cosmological description of the universe has been made, We shall all - philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people - be able to take part in the discussion of the question why is it that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we would know the mind of God (italics added].2* 454 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE A quite different scientific approach to the problem of human nature, one which many observers see as far more significant than Hawking's cosmological approach, has been put forward by the biolo- gist and neuroscientist Gerald Edelman. Edelman has attempted to formulate a general developmental theory of neural organisation and consciousness which is compatible with Darwinian biology. His theory is based on the assumption that the development of the human brain and its capacity to change its biochemical properties as a result of experience can be understood as an example of natural selection. Edel- man's 'neural Darwinism' postulates that pre-existing groups of neurons and their synaptic connections are subject to continuous selec- tin in response to environmental challenges or restraints. Although this theory remains controversial, it has been described by Oliver Sacks as "the first truly global theory of mind and consciousness, the first biological theory of individuality and autonomy,25 It is because the construction of a coherent theory of human nature has already been widely recognised as the single most important project of contemporary biological science, and because just such a project has long been implicit in the Darwinian theory of evolution, that the liberal humanist aversion to grand theories of human nature lacks a coherent rationale. In a pre-Darwinian age it would be entirely reason- able to counter the claims of psychoanalysis purely with scepticism and to place the burden of refutation on negative critiques of the kind which Frederick Crews, Frank Cioffi, Malcolm Macmillan, Allen Esterson, Robert Wilcocks and others have already offered and which I have attempted to develop here. In our own post-Darwinian era, however, the crucial question must ultimately be not whether psycho- analysis is an inadequate theory of human nature but whether it is possible to offer an alternative which does possess genuine explanatory power. It is quite true that there are a number of seemingly powerful argu- ments against the construction of any such large-scale theory. But the fact that there are also many cogent objections to participating in civil government is not in itself a conclusive argument for anarchism. The danger which faces those who renounce political power for idealistic, pacifistic or politically moderate motives is that they jeopardise the very values they seek to preserve by placing all power in the hands of their ideological opponents. Liberal intellectuals who, out of their own moderation, distrust large theories of human nature because of their PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND HUMAN NATURE 455 historical association with extremism, face a very similar danger. For by renouncing the intellectual power of theory they too jeopardise the values they seek to protect and play into the hands of the very forces they seek to oppose. What we should recognise, I believe, is that the project of con- structing a general theory of human nature - a theory which, unlike those of Marx or Freud, does have a genuinely empirical foundation - is not one which belongs purely to some speculative future. It is a project which is already under way, and which has in fact been in progress ever since the publication of The Origin of Species. Because of the enduring power of the orthodox position which I have called 'reversible rationalism', many liberal humanists will continue to dis- trust this project. I believe that they are right to do so. For our scientific tradition, as it is presently constituted, does tend to be corrosive of human aspirations and of human complexity. But it is precisely because scepticism (including scepticism about science) is necessary to the con- struction of adequate theories that a policy of participation is more appropriate than a policy of non-participation. For those whose distrust of theory is so great as to lead them to repudiate it altogether need have no doubt that the very large-scale theories they are averse to will be constructed without them. In all probability they will be constructed by thinkers who do not distrust theories sufficiently to make good ones, and who may be entirely without the kind of scepticism and sensitivity which are appropriate to any theory which seeks to construe human behaviour, human feelings and human motives. To suppose that we might sustain an adequate and complex vision of human nature without resorting to theories at all would be both to ignore the pervasiveness of the creationist theory of human nature we have internalised and to underestimate tragically the value which the currency of 'theory' now possesses in our science-dominated culture. In this culture any position which is not defended by a coherent theory is, by definition, a vulnerable position - it is a position which has, in effect, already been abandoned by those who nominally occupy it. It is for this reason, I believe, that no negative critique of psychoan- alysis, however powerful, can ever constitute an adequate refutation of the theories which Freud put forward. For in scientific reality bad theories can only be driven out by better theories. What we need to recognise is that the science of matter is by no means the whole of science, and that it is, perhaps, the least important part of it. For any human culture which devotes a large proportion of its intellectual and 456 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE economic resources to the investigation of the 'laws' of matter, while all the time allowing the 'laws' of human nature to remain veiled in mystery, is a culture which, by definition, operates in ignorance of its own motives. The more confidently such a culture characterises itself as rational or scientific, the more it confirms its own deep irrationality. A culture which operates in ignorance of its own motives and which simultaneously regards itself as rational and scientific runs the risk of committing itself irrevocably to social and economic policies which, because they disregard the constraints of human nature, will end by exacerbating the very problems they are intended to solve. It also risks capitulating uncritically to intellectual systems which depend on disregarding the evidence which is available rather than seeking to explain it. The most common response of liberal intellectuals to the death of Marxism and the discrediting of psychoanalysis has been to conclude that since all previous theories of human nature have been failures we should now abandon the attempt. Yet throughout the latter part of the twentieth century pseudo-scientific theories of human nature Lacanianism, Lévi-Straussian structuralism, sociobiology - have con- tinued to proliferate. When liberal intellectuals throw up their hands in despair and repudiate the entire historical project of the human sciences, they are not safeguarding intellectual moderation. They are merely creating the ideal conditions for secularised religions and false sciences, of the kind which Marx and Freud pioneered, to flourish and grow powerful. It is for this reason that the task of formulating a better theory of human nature than that propounded by Freud - one which is consonant with Darwinian biology but not limited by the poverty of much current Darwinian thinking - is so important. What the work of some recent theorists suggests is that the construc- tion of such a theory is not an optional item on some future intellectual programme. It is an essential item on an intellectual programme which is already in existence and which has already been advanced in a number of significant directions. TWENTY-TWO The Ghost in the Psychoanalytic Machine IT MIGHT WELL BE THOUGHT THAT, if the task of constructing an empirically based theory of human nature is one which must be undertaken within the framework of Darwinian biology, then such a theory is primarily the concern of biologists and evolutionary scientists. On this view those who are not biological scientists can do little more than wait for those who are to refine and develop the ideas which they have already begun to formulate. This position certainly seems to have some currency among those who work in the humanities. Long used to deferring to scientists, it would seem that some thinkers, even if they do accept the legitimacy of global theories of human nature, are quite prepared to leave the task of serious theory-building to others. If this point of view were to be widely adopted, however, it would have a particularly odd consequence. For it might mean that the con- struction of a theory of human nature would be left primarily to those trained in the natural sciences - which have traditionally excluded human beings from their field of study - while those professionally engaged in what are sometimes called the human sciences' would make no contribution to it. This odd situation seems undesirable for a number of reasons. Per- haps the most important of these is that, historically speaking, the contributions which Darwinian science have made to our conception of human nature have left a great deal to be desired. For although Darwin's theory provides a solution to the problem of species and an account of the development of organic forms, the many attempts which have been made to apply it to human behaviour are by no means always persuasive. While incidental insights are plentiful, Darwinian theory cannot yet offer any adequate or comprehensive explanation of the devel- opment of human culture or the complexity of human behaviour. 457 458 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE The limitations of the theory of natural selection in this respect were not always recognised by Darwin himself and they have certainly not always been recognised since. 'These limitations have frequently led to the formulation of extreme hereditarian theories of human behaviour such as the 'hard-core' model of human nature which was put forward by the biologist C. D. Darlington: Owing to inborn characters we live in different worlds even though we live side by side. We see the world through different eyes, even the part of it we see in common ... The materials of heredity contained in the chromosomes are the solid stuff which ultimately determines the course of history. In recent years a number of influential sociobiologists have attempted to explain human behaviour in terms of similarly narrow hereditarian categories. In doing so they have contrived - as scientists frequently do - to disregard what some would see as one of the most important of all scientific principles. For instead of sceptically testing out their theories against the hardest and most refractory forms of evidence, some biologically orientated thinkers have sought out just those aspects of human behaviour which can be fitted most easily into crude forms of genetic determinism. Sociobiologists frequently observe that primates copulate; they do not frequently observe that some pri- mates publish poetry, that other primates worship the Virgin Mary, and that others still are professional philosophers. It is just such facts as these, however, which remain anomalous and unaccounted for in neo-Darwinian biology. If we wish tacitly to maintain a theistic view of the world, this will not, of course, disturb us. But if we wish to use the theory of natural selection in order to illuminate human nature, then it is just these mysteries which must be turned into problems.* The science of genetics is important and Alex Comfort is undoubtedly correct when, writing as a biologist, he reminds us that "if we reject Mendel as bourgeois, we find that we have no beef."? But what we must always bear in mind is that Mendel's theories were designed to explain how the peas in his monastery garden reproduced their species, and not why the monks in the chapel within had renounced the opportunity to reproduce theirs. 'The fact that neither our ascetic and religious behaviour nor our complex non-reproductive sexual behaviour can be explained by the existing theory of natural * For a fuller discussion of these issues see note I, pp. 609-1I. THE GHOST IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC MACHINE 459 selection appears to indicate that some crucial element is missing from that theory. The ultimate aim of any empirical study of human nature must be to supply that momentously important missing element. It must thus set out to complete the enterprise which Darwin started by adding to his theory of the evolution of organic forms a theory which is capable of accounting for the complexity of the human imagination, the development of human culture, and the course of human history. In this respect one of the most interesting contributions to a Darwinian theory of human nature to have emerged from within the discipline of biology itself is that made by Gerald Edelman. Behind Edelman's work on the extraordinary complexity and biological plas- ticity of the human brain there lies a very large theoretical aspiration. For he himself sets out to go beyond the hard-centred hereditarianism of some neo-Darwinian theory in order to complete Darwin's intellec- tual project. I have written this book,' Edelman writes in the preface to Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, because I think its subject is the most important one imaginable. We are at the beginning of the neuroscientific revolution. At its end we shall know how the mind works, what governs our nature, and how we know the world. Indeed, what is now going on in neuroscience may be looked at as a prelude to the largest possible scientific revolution, one with inevitable and important social consequences. Edelman explicitly recognises that his own theory has limitations and implicitly acknowledges that his scientific approach, which draws pri- marily upon the tradition of the natural sciences, leaves many aspects of human behaviour out of account. Yet even given these qualifications, the aspirations which lie behind his theory are huge and they promise - or threaten - an intellectual revolution which would transform the entire way in which we study and reflect upon our own nature. Thinkers of a liberal humanist or pluralist disposition are likely to react to this prospect with alarm, and will point, as they habitually do, to the dangers posed by the kind of overarching theory Edelman seeks to construct. It would, I believe, be wrong to discount such warnings entirely. For Edelman's project is only likely to succeed it it incorpor- ates the lessons which can be learned from earlier failures. The fact that the most general exposition of his ideas is dedicated not only to Darwin but also to Freud may itself raise at least a flicker of doubt in this respect. Any such doubt is not likely to be dispelled by Edelman's 460 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE discussion of psychoanalysis, which includes the claim that 'Freud's] basic theses about the action of the unconscious were essentially cor- rect'4 But what is perhaps even more important is that, although Edelman is a physiologist whose work is entirely concerned with the human body, and above all with the most complex part of the human body - the brain - he presents his own work as a study of the human "mind'. Not only this but he frequently refers to the 'mind' as though it were a real entity which can be illuminated by biological research. As we have seen, the goal of the neuroscientific revolution which Edel- man has announced is not to understand human nature. It is to 'know how the mind works. It is just here, I believe, that we need to question Edelman's project most carefully. It might well be thought that the project of constructing a genuinely biological theory of human nature which goes beyond psychoanalysis is one which is entirely dependent on the kind of neuroscientific and biological expertise which a scientist like Edelman is uniquely well qualified to provide. There is perhaps a sense in which this is true. But I believe it would also be true to see the success of such a project as being dependent not simply on overcoming intellectual difficulties but on recognising that many of the difficulties with which theorists traditionally grapple are in fact illusions of their own creation. The main task, it might be said, is not to tie new and ever more complex intellectual knots, but to untie old ones which need never have been tied in the first place. There can be little doubt that of all the ancient and unnecessary intellectual knots which have prevented us from unravelling the strands of our own nature, the most important is the dispute as to whether theories of human nature should be based on a study of the observable behaviour of men and women or on a study of the workings of the human 'mind'. In this connection we must recall that Freud himself did not set out to provide a theory of human behaviour. As the word "psychoanalysis' itself suggests, he set out to provide a theory of 'mind' and a very large part of his writings is given over to an attempt to construct a model of the internal structure and 'mechanism' of 'mind'. The problem of 'mind' and 'behaviour' has not only occupied psychoanalytic theorists, but it has also perplexed philosophers, aca- demic psychologists and anthropologists alike. The anthropologist Lévi-Strauss has assumed the problem solved and has put forward what is, in effect, an entire theory of human nature which is based solely on hypotheses about the internal structure of the 'mind'. The philosopher THE GHOST IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC MACHINE 461 Gilbert Ryle has argued that the very concept of 'mind' is a philosophi- cal illusion hailing chiefly from Descartes and sustained by logical errors and 'category mistakes' which have become habitual." More recently cognitive psychologists have found in the computer an osten- sibly mind-like machine which they have frequently treated not simply as a metaphor but as a model for the human mind. More recently still the philosopher Colin McGinn has argued that the very nature of the human mind precludes us from finding a solution to the mind- body problem.? The difficulty which has come to surround the problem of 'mind' and 'behaviour' is, I believe, largely illusory. But because that difficulty now looms so large over any attempt to construct a theory of human nature we can scarcely proceed as though its shadow did not exist, for to do this would merely give rise to even greater intellectual confusion. Much of the intellectual confusion which already surrounds this issue derives directly from that universal modern predicament to which I have already referred - our culturally orthodox lack of familiarity with the orthodoxies of our own culture. For the view that the secrets of human nature can be unlocked only by a theory of mind is, although commonly held by secular philosophers and psychologists, essentially a Christian idea. This idea has its most significant source in the ancient Christian-Platonic belief that human beings are made up of two separ- ate entities: an animal body which was created by God, and a mind, spirit or soul which was given by God uniquely to Man. It was on this ancient theological doctrine that the discipline of psychology was first constituted. For psychology was originally itself a branch of Christian theology, the word having been created in the fifteenth century by theologians who were engaged in the study of the human soul.& In the eighteenth century the word began to be applied to more "scientific forms of analysis, and at the end of the nineteenth century it was adapted by Freud and applied to his own methods of analysis and treatment. By this time the theological origins of psy- chology had been all but forgotten. But the theological and moral assumptions which had always been associated with it had survived almost intact and continued invisibly to determine the way in which both Freud and many other psychologists approached the problem of human nature. If we are to appreciate the immense significance of the invisible moral theology which still underlies the thought of many of the most influential secular thinkers in the twentieth century, then we must first reconstruct that theology in its original form. 462 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE The most influential Christian psychologists never needed to accord themselves that name, for there is a sense in which Christianity is itself a psychological theory. This theory was first formulated by Jesus and Paul, and it was developed over the centuries by monks, bishops, theo- logians and Christian scholars, who sometimes found in the philosophy of Plato an ideal vehicle for their own distinctive theology. Right at the very heart of Christian psychology there lies the issue of the relationship between the flesh and the spirit - between the animal body of men and women and their supposedly immortal and non- animal soul. In view of the nature of Christian doctrine, this relation- ship could not be seen as anything other than a profoundly moral one. In one succinct formulation of Christian orthodoxy the function of the 'mind' or 'soul' was to act as "God's viceroy' in man. By disciplining and subjugating the unruly desires and appetites of the flesh, it would, in an ideal world, force man to behave in a way that constantly reflected his inward spiritual nature. Reason would play its proper role of chastis- ing concupiscence, and by chastising it, would make men and women chaste. In reality, however, such an ideal subordination of the carnal body of human beings to their divine soul was by no means always realised. For, through Adam's fall, sin had entered into the world, and men and women's fleshly appetites were now in a constant state of rebellion against the pure spirit which had originally been designed to rule over them at all times. This did not mean, however, that the unique spiritual essence of human beings had been destroyed. For the fact that men and women might at times behave like animals, and copulate with every evidence of animal lust and enjoyment, was not to be taken to indicate that they actually were animals. It was, rather, a sign that they had allowed their 'real' spiritual nature to be overcome by their carnality and had thus failed to reflect their inward essence in their outward bodily behaviour. In this respect at least the behaviour of men and women might very well be an extremely unreliable guide to their true nature, and might, indeed, bear no relationship to it at all. For this reason, although human behaviour was always a matter of concern to the Christian moralist, it was never a stumbling-block for the Christian theologian. For whenever the unruly, violent or lustful behaviour of men and women seemed to offer evidence that their 'real' nature was not reason- able, spiritual and chaste, the theologian could deal with this evidence by the simple expedient of disregarding it - or, to be more precise, by invoking the myth of the Fall in order to explain it away. Whatever THE GHOST IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC MACHINE 463 men and women might do, or whatever they might say that they felt, desired or lusted after, these actions and utterances could never be taken as a reliable guide to their 'true' nature. For although the purity of the soul might be defiled by lustful and concupiscent behaviour, it always remained susceptible to cleansing, and could never be destroyed except by God himself. It would be wrong to suggest, however, that this faith in the reality of men and women's spiritual soul ever led Christian psychologists to entirely disregard the evidence which was offered to them by human behaviour. For just as it was possible for the rebellious forces of the body to overthrow the authority of the divine reason which had been ordained to rule within human beings, so it was also possible for men and women to use their rational souls in order to chastise concupis- cence and thus subdue and control their fleshly appetites. The Chris- tian had, indeed, been enjoined by Paul to 'put to death' these fleshly appetites and to live the life of the pure spirit. When Christians sought to obey this injunction and led lives which were reasonable and chaste in all outward respects, then the evidence of their behaviour, far from being disregarded, was treated in an entirely different way by theo- logians, and was immediately construed as an outward sign of their inward reality and of man's "true' spiritual nature. It was, however, this inward spiritual reality, and not any behavioural manifestation of it, which always remained the real focus of Christian psychology. For since all men and women were deemed to be subject to Original Sin, no form of human behaviour, however apparently sinless, could ever quite convey the true reality of the spirit. Spotless behaviour might well be a reliable indicator of the general nature of that reality, but it was not the pure spirit itself. For the spirit was an immaterial entity, imperceptible to mere bodily senses. In view of this its real nature could be approached most closely only by the rational soul itself, meditating in silence upon its own attributes and defining these in purely abstract and rational ways, undefiled by the corruptions of the flesh. It was this view of human beings' God-given and rational soul which would eventually lead, in the fifteenth century, to the creation of psy- chology as a specific area of theological inquiry. More importantly still, however, it was this view which was preserved almost intact when, some two hundred years later, the modern discipline of psychology began to emerge. At this stage in its development psychology was seen as the scientific counterpart of Newtonian physics, and it is crucial to 464 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE recognise that the fundamental assumptions of both these disciplines were still quite explicitly grounded in Christian theology. Just as New- ton had seen himself as exploring the manifestations of God's ration- ality in the physical world, so psychologists saw themselves as students of the same divine rationality as it was manifested in the postulated "non-physical' world of the mind. In the words of Gilbert Ryle: It was supposed that. as Newtonian scientists studied the phenomena of the one field, so there ought to be scientists studying the phenomena of the other field. 'Psychology' was supposed to be the one empirical study of 'mental phenomena'. Moreover, as Newtonian scientists found and examined their data in visual, auditory and tactual perception, so psychologists would find and examine their counterpart data by counter- part non-visual, non-auditory, non-tactual perception.' Strictly speaking, as Ryle's words imply, the original programme of psychology granted to psychologists no licence to investigate those aspects of human behaviour which are accessible to the ordinary observer. Secular psychologists, like the most rigorous kind of Chris- tian psychologists, were expected to concern themselves solely with the immaterial 'reality' of the mind itself. In practice, however, secular psychologists are no more likely than theologians to keep their speculations unsullied by the evidence of their senses. For, as Ryle remarks, "a researcher's day cannot be satisfactorily occupied in observing nonentities and describing the mythical.'O The official view of psychology as 'the science of the mind' was not ques- tioned on any large scale until the establishment of behaviourism in the early part of the twentieth century, but it did undergo a series of expedient adaptations. In making these adaptations secular psychol- gists followed the patterns of thought which had been set by their theological predecessors. Just as Christian theologians had concluded that certain kinds of 'pure' behaviour were related more closely to the inner essence of the soul than other kinds of behaviour, so psychol- gists came to the conclusion that certain kinds of human behaviour betrayed the structure of internal mental phenomena more directly than others. Since such capacities as memory, learning, vision and perception all seem to be possessed of the necessary ghostly character- istics these became particularly prominent areas of study when some nineteenth-century psychologists began to introduce laboratory methods into their discipline. In this way experimental psychology would eventually redefine some aspects of human behaviour as "mental' THE GHOST IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC MACHINE 465 in order that it might facilitate its own researches. But the orthodox pre-Darwinian psychologist would no more have dreamed of using the observable sexual behaviour of men and women as a key to the reality of mind' than would an orthodox theologian have regarded fornication or adultery as forms of 'spiritual behaviour' or as evidence of the real nature of the human soul. Secular psychologists thus tacitly preserved the Christian-Platonic view of the soul's 'complete incontamination', and continued to regard the larger part of human behaviour, particu- larly that which could be deemed emotional, sensual or immoral, as being entirely irrelevant to their own concerns. This tacit definition of the 'mind' or 'soul' as an area of purity and abstract rationality was challenged by some philosophers, and it would eventually be challenged in a particularly interesting way by Freud. Partly because of his Darwinian orientation, Freud's concept of mind was significantly less chaste than any which can be found in the main- stream of rationalist psychology. We have already encountered Wil- liam Wheeler's view that the theories of orthodox psychologists at the turn of the nineteenth century 'read as if they had been composed by beings that had been born and bred in a belfry, castrated in early infancy, and fed continually for fifty years through a tube with a stream of liquid nutriment of constant chemical composition.'I When it is contrasted with the kind of orthodox theories Wheeler refers to, Freud's 'sexualisation' of the concept of mind does indeed seem radical and revolutionary. Yet, as we have seen, Freud did not repudiate many of the central doctrines which had always been associated with the traditional theological concept of mind. Rather he took over this tra- ditional concept and attempted, as it were, to extend it downwards. He continued to regard rational consciousness as the distinctive quality of human beings and, following the psychobiologism of Ernst Haeckel, tended to regard sexual and sadistic impulses not as an intrinsic part of the 'conscious soul' but as a residue of man's animal past which had now been relegated to the 'Unconscious'. In this way Freud preserved the moral dualism of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but now located that dualism within the mind itself. Whereas theologians had tradition- ally seen human beings as riven by a conflict between their invisible rational soul and their all too visible sexual desires and sinful behaviour, Freud's attempt to extend the concept of mind compelled him to see sexuality itself as a mental phenomenon. He went on to apply systematically to the entire realm of visible sexual behaviour the same principles of interpretation which Judaeo-Christian psychology and 466 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE theology had developed in order to safeguard the belief in an invisible rational soul. Just as they had disregarded the evidence of observable human behaviour, and seen it as an entirely unreliable indicator of internal mental phenomena, so Freud, inheriting this profoundly scep- tical attitude, set out to study not the whole range of sexual behaviour or the sexual fantasies in which men and wore consciously engage, but the invisible mental events which allegedly lie behind such behaviour. Just as theologians had traditionally seen the 'spiritual behaviour' of virtuous men and women as but an imperfect and often misleading extrusion of the internal reality of the pure spirit, so Freud saw the sensual behaviour of men and women as an imperfect and often misleading extrusion of that internal psychical reality which he believed ultimately to be the sole legitimate object of scientific psychology. The immediate result of Freud's attempt to extend the traditional concept of mind was thus not to render a larger area of human behaviour susceptible to scientific observation but to effectively remove the "flesh' from the realm of the visible and redefine it as belonging to the realm of the invisible. Throughout his theoretical writings Freud maintains this attitude of modified theological traditionalism and sees himself not as a scientific investigator of human behaviour, but as a student of the human soul - die Seele. He repeatedly refers to this 'soul' as though it were a corporeal body extended in space and, as we have seen, a large part of his work is given over to an attempt to lay hold of this ghostly body and to describe its anatomy, its ghostly digestive system and its intimate internal functions by using models drawn from electricity, hydraulic systems and other complex physical phenomena. This can be seen both in the fabulous mechanical excesses of the early Project and in his later work where he postulates the existence of a "psychical apparatus' - a mind or soul which inhabits and in some mysterious way pilots the body. Throughout his writings Freud con- tinues to describe, anatomise, particularise, and occasionally anticipate Lacan by presenting diagrams of, the internal shape and dynamics of the mind. It was in the course of his pursuit of these speculative studies of the human soul that Freud convinced himself of the reality not only of such well-known concepts of mental geography as the ego, the superego and the id but also of numerous abstruse mental processes which he then named: cathexis, decathection, counter-cathexis, object- choice, condensation, displacement, imago, object-representation, constancy-principle, fusion, defusion, anaclitic model, mnemic residue. THE GHOST IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC MACHINE 467 All these and many other terms were invented or adopted by Freud (or his translators) not to describe any observable entities or behaviour, but to postulate the existence of the spiritual entities and mental pro- cesses which he 'needed' in order to construct his theory of mind. In his selection of problems Freud never ceased to be influenced by his theory of mind. A very significant portion of his work was given over to the study of dreams, jokes, errors and slips of the tongue - all areas of human behaviour which might be held to afford the investi- gator some kind of privileged access to invisible 'mental phenomena. His therapeutic interests were presented as part of the same pro- gramme. Freud believed that the minds of his patients had, in effect, been turned inside out as a consequence of their 'neurosis': If we throw a crystal to the floor, it breaks; but not into haphazard pieces. It comes apart along the line of its cleavage into fragments whose boundaries, though they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal's structure. Mental patients are split and broken structures of the same kind…. They have turned away from external reality, but for that very reason they know more about internal, psychical reality and can reveal a number of things to us that would otherwise be inaccessible tO us. 12 Even though Freud's biologically based concept of mind extended the range of behaviour which could be considered psychologically sig- nificant, this behaviour was held to be relevant only because it could be regarded as a luminous extrusion of 'internal psychical reality' - a representative of the spirit-world of the mind which had inadvertently become incarnate in a bit of physical behaviour. The kinds of behaviour to which psychoanalysis does attribute significance in this way are frequently odd, obscure or abnormal. What ordinary men and women do, what they believe, and what they say that they feel - which is to say the larger part of human behaviour and human history - is treated as though it constituted suspect evidence, or as though it belonged merely to some external, mechanical realm which bears no direct relationship to 'mental phenomena' and can therefore hold no interest for the psychologist. It is for these complex traditional reasons that the psychoanalytic movement has very often disregarded the very research into human behaviour which it has helped to inspire. At the same time psychoanalysts, in their doctrinally inspired search for hidden or cryptic manifestations of the 'unconscious mind', have 468 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE frequently failed to study with sufficient attention the complexities of ordinary human consciousness. In all these respects orthodox psychoanalytic theorists are in very much the same position as those spiritualists or theists whose psycho- logical assumptions Freud inherited. Secure in their faith in an invisible psychical reality, they have very little motivation to consider the merely visible, particularly when this is a source of counter-instances to their own theories. Psychoanalysts normally defend this position by main- taining that through "'clinical experience' they have privileged access to this invisible reality. For, as Charles Rycroft writes, the data of psychoanalysis "are derived not from the direct observation of human behaviour, but from the analyst's experience of a particular kind of therapeutic relationship invented by Freud'.I3 It must be recognised that the therapeutic relationship which Freud invented was itself designed according to a model suggested by his theory of mind. In constructing this abstruse theological theory Freud never ceased to be influenced by the central tradition of Judaeo- Christian psychology, and never succeeded in emancipating himself from the contempt in which this tradition held the evidence offered by human behaviour. For this reason Freud, in his attempt to construct a theoretical model of human nature, was very often in the position of the astronomer who is so engrossed in making mathematical calcu- lations in his notebook that he considers his observatory a distraction and his telescope an impediment to science. When, more than half a century before the psychoanalytic move- ment was born, Darwin had set out to solve the problem of species, he had never ceased to be acutely aware of the theological origins of the disciplines of geology and biology in which he worked. Although he never succeeded in throwing off this religious inheritance entirely, and eventually capitulated to a secularised form of Christian teleology, Darwin always endeavoured to divest his chosen disciplines of the abstruse theological complexities which had grown up around them, and to study anew that evidence which he could see with his own eyes and touch with his own hands. Later, when he attempted to account for his success in formulating the theory of natural selection, Darwin said simply that he 'saw what the clever men had missed'. At the end of the nineteenth century Freud attempted to bring about a similar revolution in the discipline of psychology. Freud, however, was unaware of the theological origins of his own discipline. Rather than divesting that discipline of its needless theological complexities, he saw THE GHOST IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC MACHINE 469 it as his duty to multiply those complexities. His theory failed because, too often, in his anxiety to construct an abstract and intellectually complex theory of mind, he missed what simple men could see. Freud's theories provide one very significant example of the manner in which ancient theological attitudes towards the problem of 'mind' and 'behaviour' continue invisibly to determine the shape of modern theories of human nature. It is important to recognise, however, that whereas Freud challenged the traditional view of mind as an area of purity and abstract rationality, the mainstream of our rationalist intellectual culture has preserved the orthodox Judaeo-Christian view in an almost intact form. There is no clearer example of the direct continuity between traditional theological rationalism and modern secular rationalism than that provided by the emergence in the latter part of the twentieth century of structuralism and post-structuralism. Since the structuralist movement and its more recent derivatives have made a very significant contribution to shaping the intellectual environment in which any new theory of human nature must be worked out, the traditionalism which underlies its supposed 'postmodernism' needs to be borne in mind. The very fact that structuralist theories succeeded in attracting such a large number of adherents throughout the Western world during the 196os and the 197os would in itself seem to indicate a certain compatibility between structuralist doctrines and older and more revered elements in our cultural tradition. Observers of the structur- alist movement, indeed, like observers of the psychoanalytic move- ment, have sometimes noted a powerful religious element in the way the structuralist "faith' has been spread by its advocates. This religious dimension of the structuralist movement was certainly visible in the group which formed itself round Jacques Lacan. At his most extreme Lacan projected himself not simply as a messiah but as an inscrutable god. The young psychoanalysts who were his students frequently referred to him as "'God the Father', and one of his former patients, Danièle Arnoux, has even recounted how she sought out Lacan rather than enter into analysis with one of his followers on the grounds that "it was better to deal with God than his saints' I+ It is not only in relation to Lacan that such cryptic religious traditionalism may be discerned. For the case of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who is generally agreed to be the 'purest' of all structuralist thinkers, provides an even more interesting example. THE GHOST IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC MACHINE 469 it as his duty to multiply those complexities. His theory failed because, too often, in his anxiety to construct an abstract and intellectually complex theory of mind, he missed what simple men could see. Freud's theories provide one very significant example of the manner in which ancient theological attitudes towards the problem of 'mind' and 'behaviour' continue invisibly to determine the shape of modern theories of human nature. It is important to recognise, however, that whereas Freud challenged the traditional view of mind as an area of purity and abstract rationality, the mainstream of our rationalist intellectual culture has preserved the orthodox Judaeo-Christian view in an almost intact form. There is no clearer example of the direct continuity between traditional theological rationalism and modern secular rationalism than that provided by the emergence in the latter part of the twentieth century of structuralism and post-structuralism. Since the structuralist movement and its more recent derivatives have made a very significant contribution to shaping the intellectual environment in which any new theory of human nature must be worked out, the traditionalism which underlies its supposed 'postmodernism' needs to be borne in mind. The very fact that structuralist theories succeeded in attracting such a large number of adherents throughout the Western world during the 196os and the 1970s would in itself seem to indicate a certain compatibility between structuralist doctrines and older and more revered elements in our cultural tradition. Observers of the structur- alist movement, indeed, like observers of the psychoanalytic move- ment, have sometimes noted a powerful religious element in the way the structuralist "faith' has been spread by its advocates. This religious dimension of the structuralist movement was certainly visible in the group which formed itself round Jacques Lacan. At his most extreme Lacan projected himself not simply as a messiah but as an inscrutable god. The young psychoanalysts who were his students frequently referred to him as 'God the Father', and one of his former patients, Danièle Arnoux, has even recounted how she sought out Lacan rather than enter into analysis with one of his followers on the grounds that "it was better to deal with God than his saints' '* It is not only in relation to Lacan that such cryptic religious traditionalism may be discerned. For the case of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who is generally agreed to be the 'purest' of all structuralist thinkers, provides an even more interesting example. 470 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE The anthropologist Adam Kuper has described how, during the 196os, several leading British anthropologists succeeded in 'converting' some of their most promising students to the new structuralist doc- trines. He adds that their success was facilitated by the almost religious enthusiasm of some of the pro- ponents of Lévi-Strauss's ideas. 'Structuralism' came to have something of the momentum of a millennial movement and some of its adherents felt that they formed a secret society of the seeing in a world of the blind. Conversion was not just a matter of accepting a new paradigm. It was, almost, a question of salvation.'S The significance of such religious fervour can be appreciated only if we examine Lévi-Strauss's own ideology. For at the very heart of Lévi-Strauss's intellectual system there lies a belief which is so unim- peachably orthodox that it has often entirely escaped observation. He maintains, with no less rigour than the strictest kind of theologian, that human beings are made up of two separate entities, whose theological origins he minimally disguises by describing them as "the organism' and 'the intellect'. In his view the sole business both of the psychologist and the anthropologist is to investigate the operations of the 'intellect, for it is by this means alone that the distinctive essence of human nature - 'l'esprit humain' - can be uncovered. Throughout his work, Lévi-Strauss implicitly characterises this 'human spirit' in the same way that theologians have traditionally characterised man's God-given soul - it is orderly, chaste and rational, and apparently undefiled by any form of emotion or desire. Indeed Lévi-Strauss makes it quite clear that the study of human emotions is irrelevant to anthropology as he conceives it: As affectivity is the most obscure side of man, there has been the constant temptation to resort to it, forgetting that what is refractory to expla- nation is ipso facto unsuitable for use in explanation. . Actually, impulses and emotions explain nothing: they are always results, either of the power of the body or the impotence of the mind. In both cases they are consequences, never causes. The latter can be sought only in the organism, which is the exclusive concern of biology, or in the intellect, which is the sole way offered to psychology, and to anthropology as well. It should be said that Lévi-Strauss's scepticism about explanations which invoke affectivity as a causal factor is, in one respect, entirely THE GHOST IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC MACHINE 471 legitimate. To claim that people resort to redemptive rituals because they afford relief from guilt is not to offer an explanation; it is simply to beg the question as to what the nature of guilt is, and why particular rituals offer relief from it. But what is distinctive about Lévi-Strauss's position is that his methodology makes it impossible to ask such ques tions. For, as can be seen from the passage quoted above, he proceeds from the truistic observation that human emotions are difficult to explain to the arbitrary conclusion that anthropologists should disre- gard emotional factors. Instead the human animal is divided into the fictions of 'intellect' and 'organism', the intellect being held to exist in some obscure and mystical way outside the organism. Our emotions are, apparently, neither part of the organism nor of the intellect. They appear to exist in some undefined limbo where no human science may legitimately address its attentions. The ontology presented here bears no relationship to any possible post-Darwinian view of the human organism. The main difference between Lévi-Strauss's view of the 'human spirit' and traditional theo- logical views is that, whereas theologians tended to regard the human soul as being composed of a kind of immaterial essence of rationality and goodness, Lévi-Strauss attributes to it the very characteristics of order, regularity and pattern which are found in mathematics, and sees it as being composed of unconscious mental 'structures'. As Edmund Leach puts it in his study of Lévi-Strauss, the object of analysis "is conceived as a kind of algebraic matrix of possible permutations and combinations'.'7 Like his theological predecessors Lévi-Strauss sees the distinctive reality of 'man' as residing entirely within this invisible spiritual entity. Like them he is thus compelled to adopt an extremely radical attitude towards the evidence which is provided by human behaviour. For, since the days when the fundamental tenets of Judaeo- Christian psychology were first formulated, men and women have not, by and large, become any less unruly, any less violent or any less lustful, and their behaviour still seems to provide evidence that their 'real' nature is far from being chaste, rational and orderly. Lévi-Strauss deals with this evidence by adopting the simple theological expedient we have already encountered - he disregards it. Because Lévi-Strauss is a rational intellectual living in the middle of the twentieth century he does not, of course, appeal to the doctrine of Original Sin in order to justify this ancient strategy. But it is precisely because he is a rational intellectual living in the middle of the twentieth century that he does not need to. For both that doctrine and the Judaeo-Christian 472 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE psychology which is associated with it have now become so deeply internalised into our habits of thought that they have come to form a kind of invisible intellectual environment from which secular thinkers may draw assumptions without ever recognising that they have done so and without it ever being noticed by their readers. Lévi-Strauss's greatest difficulty is thus not in persuading his readers to disregard the evidence of human behaviour, but in finding evidence to support his own theory of the particular character of the human soul. In past centuries traditional Christian missionary-anthropologists who took to journeying among savage and barbarous peoples in remote corners of the earth often experienced similar difficulties in verifying their theories. For although there was, among the lewd and obscene rituals of primitive tribes, much evidence to be had for the truth of the doctrine of Original Sin, there was very little of that chaste and rational behaviour which might be expected from those in possession of God-given souls. Such difficulties were not insuperable, however. For if these missionaries examined the taboos of primitive cultures closely enough, they would invariably discover some faint glimmerings of moral awareness, some sign that the immortal soul had not been entirely lost. Kneeling down beside these glimmerings of God, they would at once begin to fan them into the true flames of the spirit. Before very long the natives in question would be persuaded to desist from their barbarous rituals, fornicate less frequently or less openly, and begin to exhibit more and more of that kind of virtuous behaviour which alone offers confirmation of the tenets of Christian psychology. Lévi-Strauss's difficulties, it must be conceded, are far more acute than those of the traditional Christian missionary. For whereas Chris- tian theology has always characterised the human soul as both wholly good and wholly rational, Lévi-Strauss, in an unconscious attempt to disguise from himself the moral nature of his own theology, has found the essence of the human soul to reside purely in its rationality. Since he believes that this rationality takes a specific logical and algebraic form, this means that no ordinary behaviour, however good it may be, can satisfy his need for evidence. What his theories demand from the members of primitive cultures is evidence not so much of good moral- ity as of good mathematics. For if the 'human spirit' is indeed logical and algebraic in its essence, then it follows that even primitive cultures will provide some evidence of this. Expectations which are too reason- able, however, are very often thwarted. While it is moderately easy to find evidence of algebraic skill and absorption in abstract intellectual THE GHOST IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC MACHINE 473 problems in the classrooms of the Sorbonne, the same task becomes a great deal more difficult when it is pursued in the jungles of South America. Historically speaking, however, poverty of evidence has never been an obstacle to faith. Lévi-Strauss's solution to an apparently intractable theological problem is to claim that the abstract logical skills of the members of primitive cultures have been secreted all the time in their myths and marriage customs without either them, or any other anthro- pologist, ever having been aware of this fact. Using his own Freud-like powers of rational exegesis and abstract ingenuity, Lévi-Strauss pro- ceeds to analyse these myths and marriage customs in such a way that the evidence which is required by his hypothesis emerges from them. His approach to myth derives directly from the kind of linguistic analy- sis pioneered by Jakobson. Just as structural linguistics treats phonemes as though they were the smallest components of an autonomous entity called 'language', so Lévi-Strauss breaks down myths into something which he calls at one point 'mythemes', which are held to be the smallest components of *l'esprit humain'. As structural linguistics disre- gards the affective and semantic content of language, so Lévi-Strauss disregards entirely the affective content of myths, together with their surface meaning. Following Jakobson he maintains that myths are made up of elements which are related by a process of abstract binary logic, opposing pairs of concepts such as culture and nature, the raw and the cooked, the fresh and the rotten, honey and ashes. It is in this manner that the 'human spirit' is shown to be no less pure, rational and logically astringent in primitive cultures than it is in modern post-Cartesian cultures. It is by assuming the existence of an invisible spiritual entity which is separate from the human organism, and attributing to it the characteristics of order, regularity and system- atic logic, that Lévi-Strauss quietly, and with very little fuss, undertakes a massive repudiation of what the non-specialist might regard as the historically constituted subject-matter of anthropology. For anthropol- ogy, as Lévi-Strauss conceives it, is not a study of human societies in all their historical, economic, religious and political dimensions. Still less is it a study of human behaviour or of the relationships which exist between parents and children, women and men, leaders and led Anthropology is seen rather as consisting solely in the study of uncon- scious processes of logic which are both hypothetical and invisible. It is thus converted into a branch of speculative psychology. Any myths or customs which anthropologists have traditionally had difficulty in 474 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE explaining are immediately assumed by Lévi-Strauss to be vehicles for invisible mental structures, and as such worthy of 'structural analysis'. Any aspect of human behaviour which cannot be so redeemed by intellectuality is cast by Lévi-Strauss into the category of the 'organ- ism', or regarded as emotional and therefore of no interest to the student of the intellect. The consciously held beliefs of men and women, their emotions, their everyday conduct, their habits of work, the wars that they fight, their family life and their attitudes to children, may be matters of concern to the biologist, the historian, the economist or the novelist. But they cannot - or should not - be the concern of the anthropologist who, in Lévi-Strauss's view, is nothing other than the scientist of the human soul. The concealed religious traditionalism of Lévi-Strauss's attitude towards human behaviour has generally escaped observation by his colleagues. One exception is the American anthropologist Stanley Diamond. As Diamond writes: 'Lévi-Strauss emerges as a type of religious and philosophical thinker, a theologian in spite of himself, who cannot accept an apocalyptic notion of God and thus adopts an anthropological stance in order to ground his arguments in "reality"." I Lévi-Strauss's intellectual vision, indeed, merely intensifies, and attempts to modernise, what have always been the central tenets of Judaeo-Christian rationalism. Just as Paul, one of the most fiercely ascetic of Christian psychologists, came to perceive his own renunci- ation of the flesh as the very core of selfhood, and could experience other men and women as 'real' only to the extent that he could see them as purely spiritual, so Lévi-Strauss, in offering his own apocalyp- tic vision under the guise of a theoretical apprehension of social reality, effectively purges human beings of all trace of carnality. Falling victim to the most subtle form of cultural chauvinism, the most refined form of racialism, he proclaims the humanity of the 'savage' only after he has delivered him from his body, his emotions and his customary behaviour. He embraces the savage only after he has recreated him in his own image - the wholly rational, bodiless image of the twentieth- century intellectual. In Christian psychology, as I have tried to show, a moral theory of how men and women ought to behave became the basis of a theological theory of how men and women had actually been created. This theory maintained that human beings contained within them a pure and THE GHOST IN THE PSYCHOANALYTIC MACHINE 475 rational spiritual entity which was the very essence of their nature. The underlying moral theology of Christianity has been preserved in a tacit form both by structural anthropology and, in a more complex and subtle form, by psychoanalysis. For both these theories are prem- ised upon the notion that the human animal can be divided into rational and non-rational parts. Both assume the superiority of the supposed rational portion of the human being, and both see its function being to control, suppress or subjugate a non-rational part of the self, which is deemed to be inferior and animal. It is certainly true that the ethos of psychoanalysis is significantly different from that of structural anthropology. The crucial difference between the two philosophies is that, while structuralism tends to maintain the ancient dualism of mind and body, and to see emotions and physical impulses as residing in some way outside the mind, psychoanalysis, as we have already seen, extends the concept of mind 'downwards' and characterises one particular region of the mind as being rich with impulses, emotions and appetites. Yet it would be wrong to conclude that psychoanalysis offers a theory of human nature of a fundamentally different kind from that found in the work of Lévi-Strauss. For both theories are mentalistic philosophies which reject the evidence of human behaviour. Both are dualistic and postu- late a basic antinomy between entities which resemble the "flesh' and the 'spirit'. In this way the underlying moral theology of the Judaeo- Christian tradition has been tacitly preserved. Neither structural anthropology nor psychoanalysis can, for this reason, be seen as auton- omous psychological theories. Rather they must be regarded as adapta- tons of traditional Judaeo-Christian psychology. Although the different claims put forward by Freud and Lévi-Strauss clearly conflict, the dispute between them is not substantially different from the dispute between Christian rationalists and Christian traditionalists in the eigh- teenth century (see above, Chapter 14). It is because our traditional doctrine of 'mind' is itself the vehicle of a particular theory of human nature that any attempt to complete Darwin's project by applying the theory of natural selection to human nature must, if it is not to be ensnared by orthodoxy, begin by repudiat- ing that doctrine. Although a number of philosophers and psychol- gists have attempted to do just this throughout the twentieth century, there are many indications - including the continuing currency of psychoanalysis and the prestige briefly enjoyed by structuralism - that they have not been entirely successful. TWENTY-THREE The Behaviour of the Body ONE OF THE MANY PARADOXES which lies behind Freud's achieve- ment is that it was only through his membership of the 'church' of rationalism that he was able to find the intellectual security he needed in order to launch an attack on some of the most repressive doctrines of that church. For this reason Freud's vision, no less than Lévi-Strauss's, remains deeply marked by a form of rationalist apocalypticism. His central and anxious mission was not to liberate the sensual body but to redeem it. Although he radically extended the scope of psychology in order to deal with phenomena which had often been excluded from it, he did this not so much by sexualising the realm of the intellectual as by intellectualising the realm of the sexual. In Freud's compulsive use of technical terminology, in his religious commitment to the doc- trine of mind, and in the abstruse theological complexity of his 'metap- sychology', we are confronted not by a truly scientific enterprise, but by a more traditional project which is also found in the works of such thinkers as Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes - a doomed and tragic attempt to reconstruct at the level of the intellect a sensual identity which has been crucified at the level of the spontaneous and vital body. Once again the pattern is characteristic of apocalyptic thought, in which the body is redeemed only after it has first been purified. The disguised apocalypticism and transcendentalism which is a feature of all mentalist philosophies is the first and most important reason why the attitude towards human behaviour which is contained in the doctrine of mind must be rejected in any genuinely scientific attempt to formulate a neo-Darwinian theory of human nature. For mentalist philosophies are essentially negative in their approach to visible evidence. The strict para-Newtonian psychologist must, as we have seen, concern himself solely with the non-physical events which are alleged to lie behind human conduct. If there did indeed exist 476 THE BEHAVIOUR OF THE BODY 477 some autonomous non-physical realm, then this programme might be eminently reasonable. But if no such realm exists, and if the key to human nature may be discovered only by the patient observation and interpretation of human behaviour - and by studying the human body, especially the functioning of the brain - then the programme is both superfluous and misleading. Indeed, any psychologist who adhered rigidly to the para-Newtonian programme might well be compared to the spy who, having intercepted a coded message on his radio, decides he may find out its meaning only by switching the radio off and specu- lating on the inner essence of its transistors. The fact that the spy might describe his speculations as government secrets and the para- Newtonian psychologist might describe his as psychology should not dissuade us from cataloguing both as ghost-stories, since the events they describe belong evidently to the realm of the occult. The anti-mentalist view which I express here may appear to be similar to older views. In the early years of the nineteenth century, for example, Franz Joseph Gall, whom we have already met in his role as a brain anatomist and as the founder of phrenology (see p. 89), rejected the method of introspection. He did so on the grounds that 'the most sublime intelligence will never be able to find in a closet, what exists only in the vast field of nature." Even before Gall, David Hume, in his Treatise on Human Nature had advocated a more empirical form of moral philosophy. "We must,' he urged, "... glean up our experiments in this science from a cautious observation of human life, and take them as they appear in the common course of the world, by men's behaviour in company, in affairs, and in their pleasures." The views of Gall and Hume would eventually bear fruit indirectly in some of the more valuable developments in modern psychology. There was also, however, a much more direct and baleful line of influ- ence. For Gall's work was taken up by Comte whose positivism would profoundly influence the American psychologist John Broads Wat- son. Watson was also directly indebted to Hume who had first concep- tualised human behaviour as a set of responses to given stimuli. When Watson inaugurated "behaviourism' in his manifesto of 1912 he effec- tively brought about a revolution in the way that psychology was defined. What had once been the philosophy of the soul' was now increasingly regarded as 'the science of human behaviour' Like many other revolutions, however, Watson's is perhaps best understood by attending to its unproclaimed continuities with the past rather than its advertised discontinuities. For the great objection to 478 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE pre-Watsonian psychology was that, through its mentalism, it had almost entirely ignored the richness and the immense complexity of ordinary human behaviour. Yet when Watson took advantage of the philosophical confusion of mentalism, he did so not in order to liberate psychology from reductionism but in order to impose upon it an approach which was almost as narrow. For what psychologists were now urged to study was not the whole of human behaviour but a positivistic or experimental extract from it. Human beings were to be studied as 'stimulus-response machines' using the same methods Wat- son had developed to observe rats in mazes. By virtue both of its reductionism and its enduring bias towards cognitive phenomena, Watson's 'behaviourism' was, in effect, a kind of inside-out mentalism. It is the reductive narrowness of the most powerful form of twentieth- century behaviourism which has made it much easier for overtly mentalistic philosophies such as structuralism and psychoanalysis to thrive. For the currency of human behaviour has been so devalued by "behaviourism' that the followers of Freud and Lévi-Strauss, in their enterprising attempt to steal the riches of human nature from inside the mind, have usually failed to notice that the said riches, far from being locked up in some psychical treasury, have lain all the time on the outside, open to observation and free for the taking. As Gilbert Ryle has argued, the association of 'mental phenomena' with some non-physical, exclusively inward reality rests on a category mistake. The overt behaviour of human beings is not a clue to the working of minds. According to Ryle's argument, it is those workings: Abandonment of the two-worlds legend involves the abandonment of the idea that there is a locked door and a still to be discovered key. Those human actions and reactions, those spoken and unspoken utter- ances, those tones of voice, facial expressions and gestures, which have always been the data of all other students of men, have, after all, been the right and only manifestations to study. They and they alone have merited, but fortunately not received, the grandiose title "mental phenomena'.+ Abandonment of the two-worlds legends means, strictly speaking, the end of the discipline of psychology. For once psychologists give up the idea that there exists some occult psychical reality which it is their special duty to study, then their field is no longer 'mind', or those aspects of human behaviour which are ghostly or 'mind-like' THE BEHAVIOUR OF THE BODY 479 to be considered non-physical, but the whole range of human be- haviour and human history. The theoretical enterprise which would result would in no way resemble that proposed by the narrow evangelists of behaviourism. For a diminished and mechanistic view of human nature such as behaviourists espouse will result only if we adopt a diminished and mechanistic definition of human behaviour. The expression of religious ecstasy, the accumulation of capital, the writing of King Lear, the witch- trials of the seventeenth century, the telling of an obscene joke and the conduct of a love affair are all examples of human behaviour and there is no reason why they should not be treated as such. One common objection to behaviourism is that, in its most extreme form, it tries to tell people that they do not have any thoughts or feelings which they keep to themselves and do not exhibit in any way. Such an approach is indeed objectionable for it seeks tacitly - or sometimes quite loudly - to deny the importance of what we normally refer to as our 'inner life. The position adopted by such behaviourists is untenable since there are many sensations and feelings which are ultimately private and which, while they are palpably real to those who have them, can never be experienced by others. The particular sen- sation of happiness or strangeness or déjà vu, or even simply of hotness, which I have when I go to a certain corner of the South of France is my own and can never be either experienced by, or transferred to, anyone else. The same can be said of practically any human sensation, from the pain of being scorched to the pleasure of being caressed, or the complex fulfilment which is afforded by religious worship. To deny that such sensations or feelings are real is to deny what all those who are not philosophers know to be true. The attitude towards human nature which I am advocating here, however, is not a form of behaviourism and it makes no such denial. For there is no reason to dispute the commonly held view that human beings have an "inner life' and that this inner life is made up of feelings, sensations, memories, beliefs and convictions which can have great complexity and enormous power. Our sense of self tends to be inti- mately connected with this inner life, which we experience as some- thing which is both deeply personal and private. As Thomas Traherne put it; A secret self I had enclosed within That was not bounded with my clothes or skin. 480 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE Traherne's words communicate extremely well the idea we have of the self as an intimate area which is ultimately hidden from other people. At the same time, however, his words also exemplify one of the most interesting and significant capacities of human beings - the ability we generally possess (and which we exercise with varying degrees of willingness and success) to express our 'inmost' feelings in terms which are comprehensible to others and thereby make public the very areas of the self which we sometimes experience as intimately private. One of the reasons that we are able to do this is that what we habitually refer to as our "inner life' is not always as exclusively inward as we sometimes tend to assume. A feeling of grief would generally be seen as something belonging to our inner life. Yet in most cultures, and even in many parts of our own, grief can be a very public emotion, powerfully expressed in tears and outward displays of sorrow. By shed- ding tears we do not, of course, transfer our own inner sensation of sorrow to other people. But we do communicate feelings very effec- tively. At a much more complex and sophisticated level poets, play- wrights and novelists are often judged according to their success in dealing with the 'inner lives' of their characters, or indeed in expressing their own most intimate feelings. The novel has been interestingly described as an "anti-solipsistic device' and this formula might very well be applied to any form of verbal expression which successfully conveys complex and powerful feelings. For one of the satisfactions afforded by literature is to be found in the way it allows readers to recognise as a part of common humanity feelings which they had previously regarded as individual or private. Thus, although we habitually categorise emotions as belonging to our 'inner' life, it would be more accurate to recognise that they are constantly being translated from the private to the public sphere and that in many respects they belong to the latter just as much as they do to the former. Acute observers of human nature intuitively rely upon this fact, and when we praise writers for their insight into the "depths' of other people's characters what we are often responding to is their ability to record and intelligently construe the intricate 'surface' of other people's behaviour. As Henry James once remarked, "What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?'S Though novelists may sometimes appear to be particularly gifted students of human nature, the capacity to 'read' other people's feelings is not a special or unusual capacity. It is characteristic of the human THE BEHAVIOUR OF THE BODY 481 species and is probably one of the most biologically useful of all the intellectual abilities which we have developed over the millennia of our evolution. The psychologist Nicholas Humphrey has even argued that the human intellect has not evolved in order to allow us to indulge reflexively in its own abstract pleasures, or to allow us to solve practical problems of an economical or technical nature. Over and against these conventional explanations, Humphrey suggests that the complexity of the human intellect is directly related to the complexity of human social structures. It is his suggestion that we, in common with all primates, have evolved our imaginative intellect - which includes all those 'emotional' capacities we tend to abstract from our intellectual powers and label as 'sympathy', "insight', 'reason' and 'feeling' - pri- marily in order to enable us to predict and respond to the enormously complex behaviour of other organisms and of our own social group. Our intellect enables us to assess personal, social and political stra- tegies, to shape or modify the behaviour of others, and to order our social affairs in such a way that we may continue to reproduce our own species successfully. Although it is far from clear that this is the primary function of the human intellect, as Humphrey suggests, it does seem reasonable to claim that one of the main functions of the intellect is to enable us to be our own intuitive and practical social psychologists. When people say, as they frequently do, 'I know exactly how you feel,' they are making use of this evolutionary capacity. At the same time they are putting into practice intuitively the same kind of bodily epistemology which the Rylean position implies. For the conviction of one person that they understand the feelings of another is certainly not based on the belief that they have been granted special access to the invisible mental events which supposedly lie behind these feelings. It is invariably based on close attention to other people's behaviour - or, to use Gilbert Ryle's terms, to "those human actions and reactions, those spoken and unspoken utterances, those tones of voice, facial expressions and gestures' which philosophers and psychologists fre- quently ignore, but 'which have always been the data of all other students of men'. Part of the Rylean position can be clarified further if we take the example provided by human thought. Practically everyone would accept that if a person is thinking he is engaging in something which would normally, and quite properly, be described as 'mental activity" Since a great deal of the activity we tend to describe as 'thinking' iS 482 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE conducted privately, in a kind of silent, internal monologue, we fre- quently characterise thought itself as a process which is in some way intrinsically private and silent. And having characterised it in this way we tend to construct a figurative realm in which it supposedly takes place, which we refer to as 'the mind'. We underline this sense of privacy when we maintain, as we frequently do, that we cannot see into another person's mind any more than we can read their thoughts. Yet while it is quite possible to think privately in internal soliloquy it is equally possible to think out loud in perfectly audible soliloquy. But thinking out loud is presumably a form of mental activity in just the same way as thinking silently is. And if it is true that I am engaging in mental activity when I think out loud in audible soliloquy, then it must also be true that I am engaging in mental activity when I think out loud in other contexts - when I am conversing or debating or negotiating or agreeing or disagreeing with other people, for example - or when (as now) I am writing a book which other people can read. The more sceptically we review our own 'mental activity', indeed, the more we are driven to recognise that something we habitually characterise as private and unobservable is in fact very often public and accessible. If we take an evolutionary perspective on the development of lan- guage this should not be in any way surprising. For it seems reasonable to suppose that language, which is now the primary medium for human 'mental activity', evolved as a method of communication and not, in the first place at least, as a device for private cogitation. Speaking to ourselves is a relatively late and sophisticated accomplishment. Yet so powerful is the dogma of the ghost in the machine and the 'private- theatre' concept of mind, that most people forget this most of the time. As Ryle observes, they 'even come to suppose that there is a special mystery about how we publish our thoughts instead of realising that we employ a special artifice to keep them to ourselves? By pointing out that a great deal of our "mental activity' is not private and unobservable, as the official Cartesian doctrine maintains, what Ryle is trying to stress is that the principal theatre of the mind is not the private one of our dreams and imaginings, however important this may be; it is the public theatre of our actions and utterances. It is none other than the world of human relationships and human his- tory, and it is by studying this public world that the mystery of human mental activity - which we misleadingly call the human 'mind' - may best be understood. THE BEHAVIOUR OF THE BODY 483 In his rebuttal of mentalist philosophies Ryle is thus deliberately endorsing the kind of epistemology which we all use every day in our relations with others. The fact that we may base theories of human nature on the evidence provided by human behaviour does not in itself, of course, guarantee the scientific value of these theories. But what Ryle's argument does imply is that any theories of human nature which repudiate the evidence of behaviour and refer solely or primarily to invisible mental events will never in themselves be able to unlock the most significant mysteries of human nature. One of the questions that remains is why Ryle's arguments, which are put forward in The Concept of Mind in such depth, and with such lucidity and vigour, have failed to bring about the revolution in human knowledge they might reasonably have been expected to. One answer is that Ryle's objection to mentalist philosophies is not adequate in itself. For, although his argument effectively dissolves the largest and philosophically most weighty part of the mind-body prob- lem, a significant residue remains. This is the problem posed by the 'subjective' aspect of our own experience - our sensations, our mem- ories, our consciousness, our sense of self. One of the most interesting questions is whether this residue is indeed the trace - or perhaps even the essence - of 'mind'. Ryle has argued cogently and interestingly that it is not.° But a very significant number of contemporary philosophers, neuroscientists and psychologists have taken the opposing view. Indeed, far from disappearing from the scene, as one might expect in the post-Rylean era, the philosophy of mind appears, in the eyes of some observers at least, to have usurped the throne so recently occu- pied by the philosophy of language and to have been installed, as Simon Blackburn has put it, as the "Queen of the philosophical sciences'? The focus of much of this recent work has been the problem of consciousness. This problem has been formulated in a variety of differ- ent ways. In a much-quoted passage from a much-cited paper, the philosopher Colin McGinn put the matter like this: We know that brains are the de facto causal basis of consciousness, but we have, it seems, no understanding whatever of how this can be so . Somehow, we feel, the water of the physical brain is turned into the wine of consciousness, but we draw a total blank on the nature of this conversion. Neural transmissions just seem like the wrong kind of materials with which to bring consciousness into the world, but it appears that in some way they perform this mysterious feat. The 484 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE mind-body problem is the problem of understanding how the miracle is wrought. 10 As has already been noted, McGinn goes on to argue that the very nature of our minds precludes us from finding a solution to this prob- lem. His philosophical pessimism on this issue, however, has not been universally accepted and attempts to solve the mind-body problem have continued. One of the most interesting of these is Nicholas Humphrey's A History of the Mind." This luminously argued book is, in effect, an answer to McGinn's paper. When it appeared in 1992, Humphrey's argument was roundly and predictably rejected by McGinn, who made a number of detailed criticisms of it."? But one reviewer in particular managed to convey both something of the flavour of Humphrey's book and its unusual nature. Describing the book as a 'persuasive tour-de-force', Julian Dibbell wrote that Humphrey unfolds this story so suspensefully it would be like telling the end of a mystery novel to outline his hypothesis in any detail. But it doesn't ruin any surprises to note that his basic premise - that con- sciousness emerged from the wriggling of primordial skin - brings a pungent whiff of the carnal into cognitive science's often creepily body. hating atmosphere." Although Humphrey himself offers his book as an attempt to solve the entire mind-body problem, this is misleading. For what he actu- ally does, as Julian Dibbell implies, is to use the theory of natural selection to suggest that the problem of consciousness is not fundamen- tally a problem which belongs to the philosophy of mind, but to the evolutionary biology of the body. The problem of 'mind' is, in effect, an illusion produced by our failure to understand the evolutionary history and the neurophysiological complexity of the human organism. If I am right in characterising Humphrey's achievement in this way, then he has effectively dissolved the final residue of dualism even though a number of the details of his hypothesis remain highly specu- lative, and open to the kind of objections which McGinn has made against them. For, by showing that any account of the origin of con- sciousness must address itself to the evolutionary development not of the mind nor even of the brain, but of the entire body and all its sensory apparatus, Humphrey implicitly demonstrates that the pursuit of consciousness as an aspect of some non-physical, non-bodily 'mind' is a chimaera. THE BEHAVIOUR OF THE BODY 485 Some of the reasons for saying this will emerge most clearly if we consider Colin McGinn's confident claim that 'We know that brains are the de facto causal basis of consciousness.' The most obvious objec- cion to this claim, as we know from the pickled remains of Lenin, Einstein and Jeremy Bentham, is that the human brain, once unhitched from the body of whose complex nervous and sensory system it is a part, is neither intelligent nor, indeed, conscious. This objection is by no means as trivial as it might appear to be. For, anatomically speaking, the brain reflects the structure of the body and is in one sense an image of the body - a neural chart onto which every part of the body is intricately mapped in a form which is then projected back onto the periphery of the body with its richly innervated organs, musculature and skin. '+ The brain and the rest of the body form a complex, func- tionally indivisible unity, and just as it would be wrong to attribute the faculty of sight exclusively either to the eye or the brain, so it is fundamentally misleading to characterise the brain as the causal basis of consciousness. To do this is to commit a category error of the kind made by the visitor to the House of Commons who, after seeing a number of Members of Parliament in session, reports that he has seen a democracy; or the visitor to King's Cross Station, or Clapham Junction, who claims he has seen Britain's railway system. Human beings are intelligent not because they are piloted by a non-physical entity called the mind or soul, nor even because they are controlled by a physical entity called the brain, but because of the extraordinary neurophysiological complexity of their entire bodies. It is certainly true the brain is an extremely important part of the human organism, structurally more complex than any other part, or indeed than any object in the known universe. But in so far as it is logically correct at all to characterise our brains as 'intelligent' we should also speak of ourselves as having intelligent eyes, intelligent ears, intelligent noses, intelligent tongues, and, in comparison with those of other species, and judging by the richness of their innervation, exceptionally intelli- gent hands. In the end, however, none of these descriptions can be justified biologically. For the human organism is an indivisible unity. Both consciousness and intelligence are properties, ultimately, not of the brain or of any organ or set of organs, but of both acting together. We are intelligent because we have intelligent bodies. We are con- scious not because we have minds, but because consciousness is one of the properties of the particular kind of intelligent body we have evolved during the course of evolutionary history. 486 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE This way of dissolving the mind-body problem has been implicit in the theory of natural selection ever since it was first formulated. In view of this it would be only reasonable to inquire why it has not found more favour among Darwinian thinkers, and why we had to wait for considerably more than a century from the time that The Origin of Species was published until the first coherent Darwinian dissol- ution of the mind-body problem was offered by Nicholas Humphrey. We might further inquire why one of the foremost Darwinian thinkers of our day, Gerald Edelman, frequently refers to the 'mind' as though it were a biological entity - or as though the Cartesian ghost in the machine, which supposedly acts as the invisible pilot of the body, were real after all. To the extent that Edelman's work actually focuses on the structure and function of the human brain, his use of mental concepts may be regarded, in part at least, as merely residual. But his habit of using the essentially Cartesian, or pre-Darwinian, terminology of 'mind' to expound an explicitly post-Darwinian theory of the function of the brain is fraught with philosophical hazard. It provides an excellent example of how difficult we find it to come to terms with the notion that we are all body, and how ready even Darwinian thinkers are to smuggle a form of mind-body dualism back into their theorising by resorting to what might be called 'brain-body' dualism. So familiar has the concept of mind become that we regard it as a 'fact' of human existence and treat it and other mentalistic concepts as though they were raw empirical data, or 'common sense', while simultaneously allowing them to eclipse much of the real data of human behaviour. We even construct our own identity in terms drawn from a dualistic, essentially theological theory of the human organism and it is this, more than anything else, which makes it so difficult for us to think clearly and objectively about human nature. We find it psychologically difficult to think fluently or coherently in any other terms. For while we may, with relative ease, free ourselves from ancient and fallacious theoretical perceptions of the material universe - for these scarcely affect our own identity - it is much more difficult to free ourselves from fallacious theories about our own nature. For these theories are frequently not only invisible but constitutive of our very identity. If orthodox dualism accurately reflected our nature and we thought with our minds - abstract non-physical thinking-systems which, because they are the very essence of rationality, can be infinitely and effortlessly reconfigured so that they correspond at all times with THE BEHAVIOUR OF THE BODY 487 reality- we would, in theory at least, find it relatively easy to abandon our old pre-Darwinian theories about human naturé and formulate a new theory. But one of the most significant of all the discoveries made by modern biologists researching into human learning effectively confirms the position which I have argued here - that we think with our bodies. Perhaps the clearest account of the research which makes it possible to formulate such a conclusion has been given by the biologist and neuroscientist Steven Rose. Much of Rose's own work over the past two decades has run parallel to that of Edelman and has been con- cerned with exploring a hypothesis outlined most influentially by the Montreal psychologist Donald Hebb in his book The Organization of Human Behaviour, which was published in 1949. What Hebb proposed, in effect, is that whenever conditioned reflexes are established in an organism by a process of learning, a new anatomical substratum is laid down in the brain by a physiological process in which weak or even nonfunctional synapses are strengthened by biochemical modification or by permanent changes in their electrical properties. Learning, in other words, is not simply something which is impressed upon a passive brain. The process of learning might actually be cognate with a process in which the cellular structure of the brain is permanently modified. Donald Hebb's theory has proved to be a classic scientific hypothesis - comparable, perhaps to Harvey's prediction that microscopic examin- ation of the body would reveal that an exchange of blood took place between veins and arteries by way of invisible 'pores'. For just as Harvey's hypothetical pores eventually became real capillaries, so recent research into the neurophysiology of learning has established beyond doubt that the kind of structural changes in the brain which Hebb hypothesised do in fact take place. Steven Rose has summarised the results of the neuroscientific research into this problem over the last two or three decades: When an animal learns - that is, when it confronts some novel environ- ment, some new experience which requires it to change its behaviour so as to achieve some goal - specific cells in its central nervous system change their properties. These changes can be measured morphologi- cally, in terms of persistent modifications to the structure of the neurons and their synaptic connections as observed in the light or electron micro- scope. They can be measured dynamically, in terms of localised, transi- ent changes in blood flow and oxygen uptake by the neurons during the processes of learning or recall. They can be measured biochemically, in 488 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE terms of a cellular cascade of processes which begins with the opening of ion channels in the synaptic membranes and proceeds by way of complex intercellular signals to the synthesis of new proteins which, inserted into the synaptic and dendritic membranes, are responsible for these morphological changes. And they can be measured physiologically, in terms of the changed electrical properties of the neurons that also result from their altered membrane structures. IS What applies to animals, and the way in which they modify their behaviour in response to novel situations, also applies to human beings and the manner in which we build mental maps or theories. Because our intellectual habits - our habits of belief, and our habits of thought - are, no less than our muscular habits, physically encoded in complex patterns of interconnecting neuronal groups within the brain, patterns which become stronger each time they are used, it is extremely difficult for us to unthink our orthodox assumptions and to rethink old problems in terms of radically new categories and assumptions. Unlearning cul- tural responses, orthodoxies and theories to which we have been habituated since the cradle is something which comes no more natur- ally than dancing the foxtrot backwards or systematically inverting the word-order of every sentence that we speak. If, lapsing back into the creationist world-view, we say, as I have done here, that we find it psychologically difficult to think about human nature other than in creationist terms, we exemplify the very problem we seek to analyse. It is because this psychological difficulty is actually a physiological difficulty, determined ultimately by the structure of the human brain, and the biological changes which take place in the human brain as a result of any form of learning, that our predicament is so general and that we, like Gerald Edelman (and indeed like Darwin himself), tend to relapse into pre-Darwinian categories whenever we discuss that part of nature we have theorised about most extensively and with the greatest emotional involvement - ourselves. TWENTY-FOUR Beyond Psychoanalysis ONE OF THE OBSTACLES which stands in the way of the Darwinian or neo-Darwinian programme to construct an adequate theory of human nature is science itself. For modern science is, as Bacon conceived it in the seventeenth century, and as it has subsequently developed, "a legitimate, chaste and severe form of inquiry.! In these words we can see the influence of Puritanism on scientific thought at its most direct. An attitude of chastity is certainly fitting for the scientist probing into the secrets of mother nature. It is, however, in no way appropriate to the study of carnal humanity. When we confuse the pursuit of know- ledge with the pursuit of virtue it is usually at the expense of truth. Historians of science inadvertently point to the religious fault which runs beneath the epistemology of modern science when they talk of the 'mathematical empiricism' of Kepler and Galileo, or the 'rational empiricism' of Boyle and Newton. For a rational empiricist is no more a true empiricist than a vegetarian omnivore is truly omnivorous. Although rational or mathematical empiricists are bound to disavow idealism, they remain crypto-idealists. For they are committed to accepting the testimony of their senses and their experience only to the extent that this can be formulated according to rationalist or math- ematical models. Any experience which cannot be assimilated in this manner into a universe of rationality is tacitly denied or repudiated. Throughout the scientific revolution, Christian scientists such as Descartes, Newton and Boyle not only repudiated or ignored a great deal of evidence in this manner, they also divided nature into different areas and focused on particular aspects or properties of it in order that they might more easily measure and thus mathematise it. In adopting these partial approaches they effectively broke the complex unity of nature into tiny fragments which could not easily be reassembled into any coherent picture. But whereas Christian rationalism had led to this microscopic approach to science, in which nature was divided and 480 490 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE dissected before it was analysed, Darwin's own much larger conception of empiricism led him to recognise that any truly scientific theory of nature could not be formulated from any other point of view than a macroscopic one. His own task was therefore clear. It was to develop a theory which would itself help him to laboriously piece together the fragments of the vast picture which had been broken up by Christian rationalism. Only by disregarding artificial disciplinary boundaries between botany and zoology, between geology and biology, and by viewing the whole of nature in a historical perspective, was Darwin able to theorise himself into a position where he could reclaim nature from rationalistic abstraction and see the entire coherent picture. It was this holistic approach which enabled him to discern for the first time the complex and subtle relationships which existed between the structure of every organic being and that 'of all other organic beings with which it comes into competition for food or residence, or from which it has to escape, or on which it preys'? The difference between the microscopic analysis of Christian scientists and the macroscopic approach adopted by Darwin was both dramatic and radical. Whereas microscopic analysis was essentially transcen- dental and creationist in its conclusions, Darwin's macroscopic approach was, in almost all cases, truly scientific and truly empirical. The revolutionary significance of Darwin's shift in perspective can be summed up in a single example. Abstracting a flower from the dark tangle of its earthy roots and the sticky sex of its stigmata, the nine- teenth-century theologising botanist would point to the symmetry of its petals as evidence for the existence of a pure-minded, pattern-loving deity. It took a Darwinian perspective to establish that the flower was crucial to the plant's reproductive cycle and had evolved its particular form in response to the sexual preferences and anatomical proportions of pollen-bearing insects.' As Freud himself came near to perceiving, it is Darwin's regenerate science, rather than the fragmented theologising science of Bacon or Newton, which must serve as a model for those who study human nature. For truly scientific empiricism, of the kind which is necessary to the construction of any adequate neo-Darwinian theory of human nature, cannot be chaste. Nor can it allow itself to restrict its attention merely to those aspects of human nature which can be construed in narrow, rationalistic terms. But although Freud challenged the chastity of science in a more interesting manner than any other thinker who has claimed, and sometimes been accorded, the title of 'scientist', his BEYOND PSYCHOANALYSIS 491 challenge was broken in its very conception both by his mentalism and by his parallel compulsion to subject emotional and erotic behaviour to a process of purificatory rationalisation. Freud's rationalism is directly reflected in his evident intellectual disdain for the most ordinary levels of human behaviour. Any naturalis- tic account of the process which Freud labelled as 'repression' would be likely to conclude that it is not something which is mysterious or elusive, something which may be conveyed only in the Latinate doxologies elaborated by psychoanalysis. Repression seems on the con- trary to be something which is wrought amid the shoe-scuffing and the hurt pride, the tantrums and the slammed doors, the dirty word and the black look, the red eyes and the smarting face, the stinging rebuke and the averted gaze which we have all experienced as child- victim or parent-perpetrator, or parent-victim or child-perpetrator, and in which there is nothing ennobling, nothing numinous or distin- guishing, nothing which will confer upon the investigator the aura of holiness or the halo of the transcendental. By virtue both of his men- talism and his biologism, however, Freud was able to sweep almost all such ordinary behaviour beneath the psychological carpet and dis- course instead on the metaphysical mysteries associated with the internal and invisible transactions of the 'mind'. Because of the power of theories, whether they be of the psychoana- lytic type or of the kind we conceal in 'common-sense', to eclipse human behaviour, and because of the rationalistic dullness of our own imagination, we have, to a quite extraordinary degree, actually failed to notice how little childhood behaviour is considered in psychoanalytic theory (including supposedly empirical theories like Bowlby's), and how much is genially - or contemptuously - ignored. Academic psy- chologists, who are often themselves wedded to rationalistic theories of various kinds, have for the most part been reluctant to recognise this. But some have applied the most profound lesson of empiricism to their own discipline. One outstanding example of such research is to be found in the work of John and Elizabeth Newson. In their studies of modern child-rearing behaviour they have documented in rich detail "those aspects of child-rearing which parents themselves take to be important. Their books, which quote generously and extensively from interviews conducted with parents, have every claim to be regarded as one of the most valuable of all pieces of modern sociological research. The Newsons' implicit assumption that 'ordinary mothers' are theor- etically innocent should be treated sceptically. But their research has 492 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE unusual strength. This can be seen above all in their freedom from the psychologist's customary arrogance, and the respect which they show for the insight and understanding of those who are not psychol- Ogists: Fundamentally our principle is that the mother is the expert on her own child. She knows more about him than anyone else; she knows about him in more situations than anyone else. Much of her knowledge is available from no other source ... The function of this research, then, is simply to tap a rich source of information which already exists but which is too often ignored: the ordinary mother's ability to examine her own behaviour and her own feelings. . As the Newsons themselves observe elsewhere, 'so far very few theories of child-rearing have been subject to the inconvenience of being reconciled with the empirical evidence.' Such is the magnitude of their achievement that any empirically based theory of human nature is likely to be indebted to them. The close study of child-rearing behaviour, while undoubtedly important, is by no means the only significant area of investigation. Indeed it is only if we set childhood development back into a much larger context that we are likely to avoid the kind of abstractionist fallacies which are characteristic of Freudian thinking. In this respect we should recognise that a holistic approach to the problem of human nature is not a Romantic indulgence but a scientific necessity. It is also entirely in accord with the approach to the mind-body problem which I have already outlined. For if we follow the radical anti-Cartesianism of Ryle, we must assume that the whole range of human behaviour, from winning wealth to waging war, from poetry to prostitution, is a legitimate subject for neo-Darwinian theory. Nor can there be any reason why theorists should not draw freely upon the works of other observers of human nature, from priests, playwrights and propagandists to anthropologists, historians and feminists. Those theorists who succeed in overcoming the intellectual's disdain for the ordinary and the unclean are also likely to draw on more vulgar sources. Not only will they accord much more significance to observable sexual behaviour than psychoanalysis does, but they will also give due attention to the obscene folk-humour of our culture and to the realm of sexual fantasy.s It might be objected that, by widening the range of admissible evidence in this way, we will only succeed in making our task hopelessly BEYOND PSYCHOANALYSIS 493 difficult and ensuring that any conclusions we draw will be impossibly complex. If empiricism were actively hostile to all forms of theory then this might well be the case. Investigators would simply be bewildered by the sheer weight and variety of evidence available to them. But it is because empiricism at its best does not disdain the organisational power of theory that it can afford to remain open to the evidence provided by the full range of human behaviour and to accommodate even the most unruly facts of human nature. Indeed, by refusing such openness, and by treating artificial disciplinary boundaries as though they corresponded to the real structure of intellectual problems, we have, up to now, effectively ensured that the problem of human nature cannot even be formulated, let alone approached with a coherent theory. Like pre-Darwinian botanists we have studied people as though they were autonomous organisms which can be analysed by dissection. Because our unacknowledged purpose has been to preserve the cre- ationist view of human nature which was so profoundly threatened by Darwin's theory of evolution, we have insisted on adopting a micro- scopic approach to human nature rather than a macroscopic one. In an effort to simplify our task and lend a spurious precision to our hypotheses, we have studied not our own nature but certain aspects of it which we have artificially abstracted and delimited. We have studied not human beings but human beings without one or several of their most vital dimensions - without a history or without a significant religious tradition, without dependent family relationships or without sexuality, without emotions or without a mammalian nature, without a sense of humour or without a determining physical and economic environment. Above all we have often written about human beings in a language which no man or woman speaks and which few are expected to understand. At a certain extreme we have surrounded our beliefs with a difficult scientific prose whose secret purpose is not to communi cate, but to intimidate and impress. In modelling our approach to human nature not on the holistic perspective of Darwinian biology, but on the fragmented approach of rationalistic science, we have effectively removed the object of analysis from our field of vision. At the same time, in attempting to substitute for the richness, subtlety and complexity of ordinary language an arti- ficial scientific or technical-sounding language, we have renounced the most accurate and the most sensitive instrument we have for analysing our own nature. If we have indeed mistaken the part for the whole, then far from 494 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE easing our task we have made it much more difficult. Instead of solving real problems we have frequently created non-existent ones. Adopting the posture of the rational and dispassionate observer in order to clear our vision, we have sometimes ended by converting human nature into a replica of our own rationalistic ideals; form, structure, rationality these become the deodorised and hygienic abstractions to which human nature must be reduced. In the end we do not divide human nature in order to understand it. We divide it because secretly we do not want to understand it. If we did we might make the terrible dis- covery that we are only human after all, the only animals in the whole of evolution who like to pretend that they are not animals. In this we resemble the seventeenth-century Puritans whose scien- tific ethos we have adopted as our intellectual ideal. For it was in order to avoid making this terrible discovery that they turned their eyes upwards to study the mathematics of the heavens, after which they began to discern the rational plan of God in every part of nature. The evidence which could have confuted their creationist belief in an omniscient and benevolent God was not, for the most part, either abstruse or hidden. It teemed in every village pond, grew quietly in every meadow and every orchard, swarmed in every hive, and decayed on every autumn fruit tree. It was written in blood on every page of every history book, carved on every gallows, and screamed out in agony from every engine of torture. Yet so powerful was the doctrine of creation, and so subtle and complex the concepts of 'evil' and of Origi- nal Sin' which had been elaborated by Christian theologians, that seventeenth-century natural philosophers could perceive these rich stores of evidence only by viewing them through creationist theory. Since this particular theory defined almost all the most puzzling phenomena of nature and of human nature as being without ultimate significance, they were almost universally treated by natural philos- ophers as being irrelevant or insignificant, with the result that these same philosophers ceased to 'see' them in any important sense at all. Many of the most puzzling phenomena of the natural world were eventually explained by Darwin. But although Darwin attempted to include human beings in his theory of evolution, he did so only by excluding from consideration some of the most refractory problems of human nature and human behaviour, We have not needed to build any new theories to hide these problems, for they had been quite adequately hidden centuries ago by the theory of creationism. Our own intellectual achievement has been to hide this theory. We have BEYOND PSYCHOANALYSIS 495 hidden it in psychoanalysis and in Marxism, in existentialism and in structuralism. We have even hidden it in some aspects of Darwinian thought itself. Failing to recognise the religious origins of the very rationalism we continue to idealise, we have bewitched ourselves with reason. Having hidden God inside our theories without noticing that we have done so we have tried to use those theories to eliminate the last traces of God from the universe. Such rationalist zeal is itself part of the legacy of monotheism, which has always seen other people's religious faith as something to be eliminated. The task of any truly reasonable theory should not be to expunge religion but to explain it. One of the reasons why our theories have failed in this and other tasks is suggested by the philosopher Mary Midgley. Noting the rationalist denigration of all forms of feeling, she writes that "it is the admission, not the ignoring, of the part played by feeling in thought that still alarms the academic mind We need to say firmly and repeatedly, against Hume, and also against the tide of our times, that the mere presence of an emotional factor in any kind of decision does not take it out of the realm of thought. All our thinking involves emotional factors as well as rational ones, just as every physical object has size as well as shape. These are not alternatives. The presence of one does not mean the absence of the other. The kind of emotional need that we have to see the universe as ordered is not something alien to thought, nor is it only its biological cause. It is also its conceptual condition. The need is a single need with two aspects. More deeply, this whole cleft between reason and feeling - this official division of our nature into radically distinct emotional and rational elements - with which European philosophy long worked and which Hume sharpened to the point of suicide, is a disastrous error. It hides essential organic connections in the middle ground, structures common to our thoughts and feelings. And this middle ground is specially important for very large metaphysical questions concerning things like the kind of order we need to believe in. One way of developing Midgley's insight is to note that, although modern rationalists are usually unable to give any satisfactory definition of reason or any explanation of why it should be opposed to feeling, religious rationalists, with whom they seem to have something in common, have no such difficulty. Traditionally, from the time of Paul and Plato to the time of St Augustine and beyond, reason was imagined as a part of the soul, and one of its main functions, as we have already noted, was to chastise concupiscence. This is implicit in Paul and 496 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE explicit in Augustine. Concupiscence was not imagined exclusively as the arena of sexual lust, but it was also the whole of man's impulsive, fallen being, which was frequently understood to include the feelings - especially unreligious 'bodily' feelings and 'earthly' affections which might distract the mind from God. The role of the rational chastise- ment advocated by the early Christians was to overcome this lower nature. 'And they that are Christ's,' as St Paul put it, 'have crucified the flesh with its affections and lusts' (Galatians 5: 24, Authorised Version). If we inquire how it was that a part of 'man' was imagined as being able to 'chastise", or 'crucify another part, we will find that the ancients were actually thinking in metaphors, as they frequently did, and that this metaphor sometimes involved personifying both the rational soul and the body (or the analogous elements). 'Reason' in this respect was imagined as a god or angel who had taken up residence in the human body which was itself sometimes imagined as an animal or a beast in need of control and discipline. The implications of this go very deep indeed. For, at the very heart of the historical concept of reason, we find concealed nothing other than the view of human psychology which is central to creationist theory; we find what should perhaps be known as "beast-angel dual- ism'.? According to this view the purpose of reason is not to accommo- date or understand or explain human nature. It is to control or subjugate the more unruly aspects of it - or even to deny or negate them. Alex Comfort, uttering the battle-cry of all campaigning rationalists, has urged that 'we cannot leave any patches of straw unthreshed because God happens to be nesting in them." Comfort's words are bracing indeed and summon us to perform even sterner feats of reason than we have in the past. What Comfort has evidently not considered, however, is the possibility that God has proved so elusive and so diffi- cult to eliminate from our theories because he has been nesting all the time in the threshing-machine itself. He has been hiding in the very instrument of reason. If we are indeed to thresh every patch of straw systematically and scientifically we need to employ a more sensitive instrument than that which has been bequeathed to us by rationalism. For rationalist epis- temologies, of the kind which were originally developed by Plato and eventually employed by the Puritan scientists who carried through the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, cannot accommodate human feelings and, indeed, are actively hostile to many aspects of BEYOND PSYCHOANALYSIS 497 human nature. If we seek to enlarge the scope of science to deal with the problems of human nature which have traditionally been excluded from it, we need an epistemology which does not repudiate or deny significance to any aspect of reality merely because it is emotionally laden, erotically charged or considered to be degraded by its ordinari- ness or its association with common humanity. Many would question whether any theory of human nature con- structed in terms of such an epistemology could ever be regarded as truly 'scientific'. Behind such scepticism there usually lies the idea that any attempt to deal with human feelings is traditionally not science and probably not true. If we were to allow the tradition of Christian or post-Christian rationalism to maintain a monopoly on the use of the term 'science' - a term which simply means 'systematic knowledge' - then this kind of scepticism would inevitably triumph. We would do well to note, however, that every scientific discipline must, if it is to remain a genuine science, recognise the level of mathematical abstrac- tion which is appropriate to its subject matter, and not engage in abstractions which go beyond this level. It is entirely possible to think systematically, coherently and scientifically about aspects of nature without resorting to mathematics at all. Darwin's theory of evolution is an example of such thinking. There is no good reason why human nature cannot be studied in the same way, providing we eschew men- talism and adopt a truly biological epistemology. I0 One further objection which is sometimes raised against such views is that all science depends on scientists' ability to remove their own nature and their own feelings from the objects which they study. In the words of the quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger: Without being aware of it and without being rigorously systematic about it, we exclude the Subject of Cognizance from the domain of nature that we endeavour to understand. We step up with our own person back into the part of an onlooker who does not belong to the world, which by this very procedure becomes an objective world. The point has been interestingly developed by Bryan Appleyard. "Galileo's discovery,' he writes, . was that an extraordinarily effec- tive way of understanding the world is to pretend that we do not exist: Few faiths, cults or institutions can have made such a bizarre and extreme demand of their adherents. It is precisely as if some sect had insisted only that its followers believe they were invisible and all else would 498 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE follow. Such a faith would be confined, we assume, to a few eccentrics and inadequates. Yet science's demand is even more extreme, and we do not notice our own acquiescence, our own eccentricity. And we do not notice because, astonishingly, the demand produces results. It works.Il It is because any science in which theorists treat themselves as both the subjects and objects of their thinking goes against the entire renunciatory pattern of the kind of puritanical ethos which Appleyard describes, that the very idea of a science of human nature is sometimes resisted so fiercely. The suspicion which 'hard' scientists often show towards psychol- ogists in this respect is understandable. For one of the things which is problematic about psychology is that, as well as sharing with the natural sciences the aim of solving problems, and divining the signifi- cance behind the apparently arbitrary, it also shares with poetry and art something of their capacity both to arouse the pleasure of recog- nition and to work powerfully on individual feelings. For while physi- cists and chemists focus attention on aspects of matter which are far removed from everyday experience and emotional involvement, psy- chologists do not - or rather should not. The more closely and accu- rately a physicist describes the structure of a particle of matter, the more remote will the terms of that description be from his or her own emotions and nature. As a true believer in the ethos of scientific objectivity wrote in the 1940s, "The stars have no sentiments, the atoms no anxieties which have to be taken into account. Observation is objective with little effort on the part of the scientist to make it SO,'12 When psychologists confront human nature, however, they are deal- ing with something in which they themselves participate. Their own desires, anxieties, inhibitions and fantasies are a part of human nature. To the degree to which these are not merely individual and idiosyn- cratic, the more closely they approach human nature, the more they will find that they confront their own nature. The objective study of others which ostensibly leads outwards in impersonal terms thus simultaneously leads inwards in terms that are intimately personal. In a science where the knower is, in a sense, cognate with the known, this pattern is natural and inevitable. The task of psychologists - or of theorists of human nature - is eternally to hold in balance the intimately personal nature of their science with its more objective, BEYOND PSYCHOANALYSIS 499 problem-solving aspects. They must above all resist that hard-centred mysticism which would import into the science of human nature ideals of remoteness, impersonality and mathematical abstraction which are appropriate only to the science of matter. The love of impersonality and mathematical rigour is entirely appropriate to physics and chemis- try, which eschew the study of organisms and their behaviour in favour of studying the relatively simple structure of matter, but any attempt to transfer to the study of human beings that love of mathematical abstraction which is the necessary attribute of the physical scientist brings with it the risk - one might better say the certainty - that the science which results will be in some way hostile to its subject; the rich complexity of human nature will be reduced to formulations appropriate only to the simplicity of matter. That the dangers of applying mathematics to human beings and human culture are not always recognised can be seen from the prolifer- ation of pseudo-mathematical equations, algorithms and abstractions which are now commonly encountered in post-structuralist or post- modernist writing about literature or human nature. The lack of moral scruples shown by many literary critics about such false science con- trasts interestingly with the moral sensitivity of one of the mathema- ticians who has thought most carefully about the 'mathematical spirit': Human suffering must not be abstracted. This should be the first law of ethics, the Golden Rule. An absurd commandment, when you think about it. If it could con- ceivably be carried out, it would destroy, in one blow, all applications of mathematics to the human sphere. Gone would be money, economics, laws of damages, insurance, operations research, statistics, medicine, social planning, military technology, and strategy. Our lives would be primitive and naive, unrecognisable. In my mind it is no accident that the great evils of the period 1933 1945 were perpetrated in a country that was the world leader in theoreti- cal science and mathematics. It was not necessary for the policy makers to have understood mathematics; it sufficed that a certain spirit - part of which was mathematical - was in the air. If the major unsolved problem of the history of Western civilisation is to account for the collapse of the Roman Empire, then surely the major problem of contemporary history is to account for the Holocaust The narrative aspects of the events in Germany during 1933-1945 are still being assembled. Alongside the narratives have been many attempts at interpretive histories. Such interpretations have been organised along a few dominant themes. Jung suggested the resurgence of the Wotan 500 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE Archetype'. Wilhelm Reich suggested the suppression of genital sexu- alit. Jean-Paul Sartre suggested intellectual jealousy. Erich Fromm pointed to the desire to control, and to the necrophilism of Hitler. Elias Canetti suggested that the German inflation of the early 1920s, which introduced huge, unreal numbers, disturbed the relationship between the abstract and the concrete. George Steiner suggested that Jewish monotheism, Christian piety, and Marxist messianism set perfectionist goals which mankind found impossible to achieve, and that the Holo- caust was a violent reaction against these ideals. I will add one more vision of perfection to Steiner's list: the Greek idea of a perfect truth attainable through mathematical abstraction. I should like to suggest that advanced mathematization, through abstrac- tion and subsequent loss of meaning, played a role. It is a possibility that merits the collection of evidence, merits speculation and argumenta- tion; for, of course, the full story does not only involve Germany alone, nor does it stop with the events of 1933-45. 13 Philip J. Davis, the mathematician who writes these words, stresses that he is not suggesting 'that a high degree of mathematization neces- sarily leads to a holocaust'. But his words are disturbing partly because they accord closely with the obsessive scientism of Hitler's own out- look. As Daniel Gasman has observed, one of the words most fre- quently employed by Hitler in his Tabletalk is "Wissenschaft, 'science. 'From the content of his conversations it is patently clear that he thought of himself as rooted in the rational and scientific tradi- tion of modern European civilisation, and that he was certain that there was a basis in science for all the beliefs and policies which he espoused.'14 It is because of the dangers which always attend any attempt to fit human beings into the narrow categories of 'hard' rationalistic science that we need to develop a more sensitive, more flexible scientific instru- ment than rationalism. As the literary critic L. C. Knights has written: 'What we need is not to abandon reason, but simply to recognise that reason in the last three centuries has worked within a field which is not the whole of experience, that it has mistaken the part for the whole and imposed arbitrary limits on its own working.'IS These words were written almost exactly fifty years ago, just after the end of the Second World War. But the kind of narrow and defensive rationalism which Knights describes still dominates our contemporary intellectual culture. Fifty years ago the most obvious remedy for this problem was to attempt to apply psychoanalytic modes of explanation. By now, it has become reasonably clear that this remedy has not BEYOND PSYCHOANALYSIS gOI worked. Today, if we are to follow the truly reasonable course which Knights recommends, we need, I believe, to lay aside psychoanalysis, together with its rationalism and its mentalism. We need in its place to develop a more Darwinian understanding of reason which is in keeping with the kind of neo-Darwinian theory of human nature whose development is already under way. One of the most attractive aspects of Gerald Edelman's approach to this problem is that, as a professional scientist, trained in an objective and to some extent rationalistic tradition, he recognises that the bio- logically based epistemology which must undergird any neo-Darwinian theory of human nature cannot exclude questions of value, or, indeed, questions of morality: In addition to qualifying our realism, we must consider questions of history and culture and ones related to value and purpose. This may seem strange in a discussion of science, which is supposed to be value- free. But the science touted as value-free is that based on the Galilean position, a physical science that quite deliberately and justifiably removed the mind from nature. A biologically based epistemology has no such luxury. I6 The fact that any neo-Darwinian theory of human behaviour is obliged to consider questions of value, morality and feeling does not mean that reason no longer has any part to play. What we need, as I have already suggested, is to exercise our scepticism about the way reason has been used in the past and re-adjust our present practice accor- dingly. One of my main purposes in writing this book has been to engage in just such an exercise in constructive scepticism. What I have tried to show, by looking in depth at one modern theory of human nature, is that our modern intellectual culture, for all its secularism and its rationalism, remains largely theological or crypto-theological in its nature. This is why psychoanalysis, with its subtle reworking of Judaeo- Christian orthodoxies and its almost completely invisible reliance on the creationist theory of human nature, has proved so deeply appealing. In seeking to explain how the psychoanalytic movement achieved the medical prestige which has been accorded to it during our own century (particularly in the United States) I have found it necessary to dig deep into medical history and to reconstruct, in the spirit of an archaeologist, a stage in the development of modern neurology and modern psy- chiatry which has been almost completely obscured by modern medical 502 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE mythology. The conclusion which I have reached, namely that the illness supposedly suffered by Freud's early patients has never existed, is a very significant part of my argument. But my main concern, as will be evident, is not with the medical reasons for Freud's diagnostic mistakes, so much as with the psychological reasons. This is why I have focused so much attention on Freud's massive idealisation of his own medical heroes - particularly Charcot, Breuer and Flies. In suggesting that Freud's susceptibility to hero-worship was an expression of his own messianic complex, I am not offering a wholly new approach. I hope, however, that the particular account I have given of Freud as the leader of a messianic movement will help to illuminate both psycho- analysis itself and its place in our cultural history. There will almost inevitably be some readers of this book who see, in the portrait of Freud which I have offered, not an upset for rational- ism, but another victory for it. The messianic confusions of psycho- analysis will be seen by such doubly determined rationalists as but an odd, regressive phenomenon, of the kind we will soon leave behind us for ever as reason extends its dominion. Or they will be seen merely as symptoms of weak will, proving the need for yet more determined atheism, yet sterner rationalism.'7 That is certainly one possible way of reacting to the critique of psychoanalysis which I have presented. It is not, however, my own intention to offer any such simple comfort to rationalism. For, as should by now be clear, I have chosen to examine psychoanalysis at such length not because I regard it as an aberration but because I see it as merely a special case of an intellectual predica- ment which is much more general. It is not only Freud and his fol- lowers who have deeply internalised creationist doctrines about human nature and human psychology, but our intellectual culture as a whole. One of the premises on which my entire argument is based is that we cannot free ourselves from our own creationist assumptions simply by recognising them in others. Intellectually it may well be that many thinkers long ago discarded the concept of God and simul- taneously embraced the theory of natural selection. But to the extent that we continue to imagine human beings as consisting of a non- physical 'mind' which is in some way attached to, but separate from, our animal body, and continue to see evolution as teleological and hierarchical, we remain cryptic creationists. Merely recognising the intellectual vagaries of psychoanalysis will not in itself release us from this intellectual predicament. We need, as I have already suggested, BEYOND PSYCHOANALYSIS 503 to focus our scepticism not simply upon psychoanalysis or upon Marxism, or upon structuralism or deconstruction, but upon the very concept of reason itself. In seeking a more sensitive instrument of investigation than that which is idealised by rationalism, my own preference is for a view of reason similar to that which has been outlined by Nicholas Humphrey. As we saw earlier, Humphrey suggests that we have evolved the behavioural capacities which we tend to refer to as the intellect' pri- marily in order to enable us to predict and respond to the enormously complex behaviour of other human beings and of our own family and social groups. This functional view of the intellect is not a rationalistic concept of 'mind', for it implicitly includes the various capacities which we tend to abstract from our political, social and intimate behaviour and label as 'sympathy', 'insight', 'reason', 'intuition' or "feeling'. I would prefer to designate this aspect of human behaviour, although Humphrey himself does not do so, as our 'imaginative intellect', or even simply as 'imagination'. Once we accept this account of the evolution of the human intellect we cannot also maintain that intelligent behaviour is rigidly determined by genetic factors, or even governed by some innate 'biogrammar'. For because of the infinitely various forms taken by societies and by social interaction, and above all because of the various degrees of renunciation which may be biologically appropriate in a given situ- ation, the adaptive effectiveness of our intellect may very well depend on its possessing a corresponding flexibility. So long as we allow our- selves to exercise this flexibility fully, then we give ourselves at least a chance of ordering our affairs reasonably. It would seem, however, that large parts of modern educational practice and of more ancient religious principles have had the effect of constraining imaginative flexibility, and severely limiting our imaginative range. To the extent to which we submit to such constraints and artificially invest our imagination with the rigidities of our social and economic structure, and the asceticism on which this structure is built, to that extent is it likely that we will mismanage our affairs. We cannot, given our present social structures, ever abandon science or revert to living intuitively, according to the unverified and unchecked conclusions of our most impulsive insights. It would be both foolish and dangerous even to hold out that as a utopian possibility. For this reason we still need all the sceptical, systematic and evidence- demanding conventions which are among the most valuable elements in 504 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE our scientific tradition. At the same time, however, we cannot afford to empty our full imaginative intellects of those capacities which we call 'sympathy', 'compassion', 'feeling' - or even of"anger' and "hatred'. Nor can we afford to renounce the most extraordinary of all our imaginative capacities - our ability to form images, to translate these into language, and to use a complex grammar of images in order to think deeply, richly and coherently about human relationships and human society. If, in deference to authority or to the spirit of our times, we renounce these imaginative and emotionally rich aspects of our intellect, we only succeed in creating that artificial and profoundly dangerous capacity which is the 'rational intellect', and do so by dis- carding the very elements of our intellect which are most adaptive which bear most directly on the way we understand and shape both our own behaviour and the behaviour of others. Unless we use the full range of our imaginative intellect, we cannot even begin to define the problems which are posed by human behaviour. This is so whether we are dealing with literature, with religion and ritual, with sexual love, with the behaviour of parents and children, or, indeed, with any aspect of behaviour normally treated by anthropologists or psychologists. It is also true in the case of that discipline which underlies all others - history. We need to take back our imaginative powers from the artists, novelists and poets to whom we have delegated them. For there is a danger in delegating imaginative powers just as there is a danger in delegating any powers. We need our own imagination. For the imagin- ation is not something which God gave us so that a few men and women might write poetry and a few others read it. It is a capacity of the human animal which has evolved its rich complexity through all the millennia of our mammalian evolution. By far the most probable explanation for its intricate and extraordinary power is that it has survival-value. If this is so it would be no more sensible to renounce its full power than it would be to forgo the use of our legs or of our hands. It is only when we have learnt again how to use our imagination - to use it not impulsively or whimsically, but systematically, consist- ently and coherently - and when we have applied the full resources of our imaginative intellect to the construction of an adequate theory of human history, that we will ever begin to grasp the realities of our own nature and our own historical predicament. Until we have done this it seems likely that we will remain in thrall to the dissociated, intellectual culture which we inhabit today, where an BEYOND PSYCHOANALYSIS 505 austere and politically influential scientific and technological culture, devoid of human sympathy and understanding, exists side by side with a weak literary and artistic culture which, because it has unconsciously internalised the image of its own superfluity, is prepared both to stand back from the political process and to concede to the natural sciences the exclusive right to explore reality systematically and to pronounce authoritatively upon it. Such a dissociated intellectual culture, together with the riven sensibility which belongs to it, is one which, whatever its members may consciously profess, exists in unconscious complicity with those political strategies which seek to subordinate human needs to technological progress, which defer meekly to imaginary economic laws, and which are committed to squandering human wealth in the compulsive pursuit of material riches. It is an intellectual culture which, by its very nature, tacitly endorses the assumption that human feelings, human fulfilment and the wealth of our intimate and community relations should be discounted as factors in the equations of politics, and that men and women should submit willingly, pacifically and even eagerly to government by the cruel junta of the rational and the quanti- fiable. This assumption has by now become the ruling and almost undis- puted orthodoxy of our technocentric, growth society. It has been able to achieve such a position of dominance because it is associated with a theory of human nature which, far from being some recent outgrowth of our modern technological environment, lies at the very heart of our most ancient and revered religious traditions. It is a theory which enjoys the almost universal assent not only of priests and politicians but also of psychologists and philosophers, and which has been endorsed by practically every significant movement in the history of Western rationalism, including psychoanalysis. This theory, which is entirely false, is the one whose epistemological consequences I have been trying to trace in this chapter - and, indeed, throughout this book. It is the theory which, in its most common form, maintains that human beings are compounded of two separate but interconnected entities - a mind which is pure and a body which is relatively impure. It further main- tains that the mind constitutes the essential reality of the individual and that the more securely it can assert its dominance and control over the body, the more surely the cause of human knowledge and human progress will be advanced. This theory might be given a number of different names. It might be known as Cartesian dualism, Platonic idealism, Aristotelian rationalism, apocalyptic reductionism, beast- 506 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE angel dualism, or even Christianity. All these names, however, tend misleadingly to localise a theory which has a much wider scope. It is more helpful to designate it simply as Western rationalism - either in its religious or its post-religious form. Because psychoanalysis attempts to deal with the realm of human feelings and human sexuality, Freud has sometimes been seen as an opponent of rationalism. Freud himself was under no such illusion. He saw himself, rather as Ernst Haeckel did, as a militant opponent of religion, who sought to supplant superstition with reason. "The more the treasures of our knowledge become accessible to people, › he wrote, "the more the defection from religious belief will spread, at first only from its obsolete, offensive vestments, but then from its fundamental presuppositions as well.' This, as Peter Gay has accurately observed, is the heart of Freud's argument: the very premises of science are incom- patible with those of religion . .. 'The warfare between science and religion', that militant slogan of the eighteenth century so fervently echoed in the nineteenth, continued to represent an axiomatic truth for Freud right into the middle of the twentieth century. As he said more than once, in more than one text, religion was, quite simply, the enemy . Freud's rationalist stance resembles, and follows, nineteenth-century anti-clerical thought His view of religion as the enemy was wholly shared by the first generation of psychoanalysts.I8 Although Freud set out to defeat this enemy, he failed. He failed because, like other campaigning rationalists, he was unable to grasp that the very rationalism which, in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies, militantly opposed itself to religion, was itself born out of the superstitions it sought to sweep away. One of the many things signified by Freud's failure is that the enterprise on which our scientific culture embarked in 185g with the publication of The Origin of Species remains unfinished. The goal of completing that enterprise is not necessarily an unattainable one. But it is remote. Before it can be reached the outward forms of human culture and the entire realm of human behaviour must be sceptically reviewed. They must be reviewed not from the narrow perspective of rationalism but with the full resources of the imaginative intellect. The voyage of the Beagle must, in other words, be made over again, and this time its course must be set so that it leads not towards remote and sometimes uninhabited islands, but towards the populous shores BEYOND PSYCHOANALYSIS 507 of human history, where alone it is possible to examine the most significant forms of religious, political and economic behaviour. The voyage in question is a hazardous one and, like all voyages of discovery, its success depends not upon the speed of the departure but upon the thoroughness of the preparations which have been made for it° This book is intended as a contribution to those preparations. What I have tried to show, by relating the psychoanalytic movement to the cultural and religious context out of which it grew, is that, to the extent that they accept the cryptic creationism of rationalism', to that same degree do modern intellectuals follow in the footsteps of priestly elites throughout history. For when thinkers accept the ethos of rationalism uncritically, their function is not so much to discover naturalistic truths about human evolution, but to suppress, transcend or in some other way evade such truths. In structuralism, in Marxism and in psychoanalysis itself - all theories of human nature which begin by repudiating the evidence offered by human behaviour - the cultural function of the intellectual as an agent of mystification has been carried to unprecedented extremes. We might well invoke the words of Nietzsche: How much does learning hide these days, or, at least, how much does it wish to hide! The solidity of our best scholars, their automatic indus- try, their heads smoking night and day, their very skill and competence: all these qualities betoken more often than not a desire to hide and suppress something. 20 One of the most effective means which intellectuals have always used in order to advance their role as agents of mystification has been the promulgation of what might be called the 'myth of difficulty. Traditional Christian thinkers were always doctrinally committed to the view that the ultimate secrets of human history and human nature were mysterious, that they were known only to God himself, and that they would be revealed only in the fullness of time when the apocalyptic moment finally came. This belief was held not only by pre-scientific Christian thinkers but also by such Christian scientists as Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle. Our modern intellectual culture has preserved this apocalyptic view of human nature and human knowledge in a secular- ised form. We still tend to believe that the 'laws' of human nature are secret, mysterious, cryptic and inaccessible, and that they can be formulated only by means of abstruse theories, or through the con- struction of abstract models of 'mind'. 508 PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE It would, on the whole, be more reasonable to assume that the laws' of human nature, far from being secret or cryptic, are written openly across the pages of our history books, and across the very face of human behaviour, in letters so bold and characters so bloody that we, in our love of the refined and the mysterious, have never even dreamed of trying to read them. This does not mean that we should replace the 'myth of difficulty' with its opposite and claim that human nature is transparent, or explicable merely by reference to "common sense' But there is no reason to accept the common view that the mystery of human nature is destined to remain eternally beyond our grasp or that it cannot be approached at all. For one of the most serious limitations of intellectuals in Judaeo- Christian culture has always been their readiness to accept that some of the greatest problems of human existence are impenetrable. Although this view has recently been taken down from the attic of history, dusted off and presented as one of the central doctrines of postmodernism, its origins are recognisably ancient. For it derives ultimately from the belief that large mysteries are the preserve of God and that his creatures have a right to delve only into smaller ones. So familiar are we with the biblical story of the Fall that we some- times forget that the foundation-myth of our entire religious culture places a taboo against knowledge at the very centre of human history. The boundaries of this taboo have been perpetually shifted and it is no longer enforced, as it once was, by torture and terror. But we should not succumb to the illusion that we have ever escaped the taboo altogether. Many of our contemporary attitudes towards knowledge and towards the investigation of human nature suggest that the terror still remains long after the apparatus of religious torture which main- tained it was dismantled. To the extent that this is so our intellectual life is still largely governed by fear and taboo. Only if we identify the taboos which still constrain our intellectual imagination and openly transgress them are we likely to create in reality a modicum of that intellectual freedom which we constantly idealise, but do not in prac- tice possess. Freud frequently managed to create the illusion that he had himself successfully completed just such an act of transgression. His failure to do so in reality has sometimes led sceptical critics to dismiss his legacy too sweepingly, without examining in detail the reasons for this failure. The view that psychoanalysis should be dismissed out of hand is one that I cannot share. For, as I wrote in my introduction, I have devoted BEYOND PSYCHOANALYSIS 509 a whole book to a theory I believe to be mistaken partly because I think it is mistaken in a particularly interesting way, and partly in order to establish the need for an alternative theory of human sexuality and human nature. What we should recognise, I believe, is that although Freud himself failed to construct an adequate theory of human nature, his attempt was more significant than many, not least because he did seek to find a place for aspects of human nature which other theorists, yet more rigorously rationalistic than him, sought to exclude from their theoreti cal outlook or even to excise from human nature altogether. It is because Freud's rationalism is less icy and less cold than many other kinds, that we, in the dying moments of our emaciated and shrunken humanism, have sometimes followed the example of Anna Freud, and huddled for warmth within the ample folds of Freud's green Lodemmantel. The fact that we have done this as a culture should not be a cause for shame, or for guilt, or for the wringing of scholarly hands. Neither should it be an occasion for chastising Freud for deceiving us, or ourselves for being deceived. It should, if we are to continue on the path of exploration, be the occasion for analysis. In this book I have tried to undertake that task, replying to the individualistic ethos of Freud's 'psychoanalysis' with an essay in cultural analysis. Although this essay is frequently critical both of Freud, and of his theories, I have tried to qualify my criticism throughout its considerable length and I end by qualifying it again. For the intellectual estate of psychoan- alysis is large and complex. It includes, in addition to Freud's own writings, the contributions of a number of dissident or independently minded psychoanalysts. Their work contains, amidst much theoretical poverty and worthless intellectual bric-à-brac, a small quantity of the gold of true psychological insight. It is only, I believe, if we accept this legacy with gratitude that we will be in a position to pass beyond psychoanalysis in order to construct a theory of human nature which is consonant with Darwinian biology and which does possess the explanatory power psychoanalysis lacks. The task of constructing that theory has already begun, and a number of evolutionary theorists have already made contributions to it. If, religiously, we place our entire trust in science and obediently follow all its precepts, which is what we have tended to do in the last three centuries, there is little likelihood of any adequate theory of human nature ever emerging from these contributions. If, following SIO PSYCHOANALYSIS, SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE the inner logic of science itself, we submit our theories of knowledge to the rationalistic scepticism of the mind, we will almost inevitably end, as many postmodernist thinkers do, by entering into collusion with the most tyrannical and repressive aspects of the intellectual tra- dition we seek to criticise. If, however, seeking not to reject science but to regenerate it, we examine the problems of human nature with the almost infinitely rich intelligence of the body, and bring to our attempt all the wealth and resources of the human imagination, the task which Darwin left unfinished may yet be completed. AFTERWORD Freud's False Memories Psychoanalysis and the Recovered Memory Movement THE OBSERVATION THAT Freud's writings, and in particular his theory of repression, are the ultimate source of the recovered memory movement which has flourished in the United States in the last decade, has been made on a number of occasions already. The subject is a huge one and in order to avoid becoming ensnared by the present I have only touched upon it briefly in this attempt to review the psycho- analytic past. But because the recovered memory movement has assumed such an extraordinary importance in contemporary psycho- therapy, no attempt to estimate the influence of Freud upon our cen- tury would be complete if it did not offer some account of this movement and of the phenomenon of 'false memory' which, in the view of many, is associated with it. One of the obstacles which stands in the way of any realistic appraisal of the recovered memory movement is the difficulty most people have in imaginatively grasping the sheer scale of it, and the extraordinary speed with which it has come to dominate the mental health debate in North America and to move rapidly up mental health agendas in many other countries. As Frederick Crews has written, 'during the past decade or so a shockwave had been sweeping across North American psychotherapy and in the process causing major repercussions in our tamilies, courts and hospitals. A single diagnosis for miscellaneous complaints - that of unconsciously repressed sexual abuse in childhood -has grown in this brief span from virtual non-existence to epidemie frequency.' Quite what the frequency of this diagnosis now is in the United States is impossible to say with any accuraey. But it is possible to make informed estimates. Crews himself relays the conservative estimate that a million people have been helped by their psychotherapists to SII 512 AFTERWORD recover putative 'memories' of child sexual abuse since 1988 alone. Tens of thousands of families have been torn apart by allegations of incest springing from these 'recovered memories'. So massive and disruptive have the effects of this kind of therapy been that there seems little doubt that in a hundred years time historians and sociologists will still be studying one of most extraordinary episodes in twentieth century history, and that in all probability they will still be arguing about its causes. It seems reasonably clear, however, that one of the crucial factors associated with the rise of the recovered memory movement is the extensive denial of the reality of child sexual abuse which has reigned both among lawyers and among mental health professionals through- out most of the twentieth century. In the realm of the law a particularly powerful influence was exercised by John Henry Wigmore, whose monumental Treatise on Evidence (1934) was one of the most famous legal texts ever published in the United States. In it Wigmore sets forward his own views on the reliability of women and children as witnesses in cases of sexual abuse. The doctrine he expounds impeaches the credibility of any female - especially if she is a child - who com- plains of a sexual offence. Wigmore warns that women and girls are in his view predisposed to bringing accusations against men of good character. He therefore recommends that any female complainant, but especially a girl who accuses her father of incest, should be examined by a psychiatrist to determine her credibility.? For the next forty years at least it was extremely difficult for women, and above all for children, to gain a hearing for accusations of sexual assault or incest made against men. This applied not only to the court- room but also to the clinic. Again and again women found that their own entirely genuine memories of sexual abuse were discounted or denied by psychotherapists. Again and again the factual accounts of distraught and distressed children were dismissed as fantasies. This massive denial of the experience of women and children who genuinely had been victims of sexual abuse provided the essential con- ditions without which the recovered memory movement could never have grown and flourished in the way that it did. John Henry Wigmore clearly played a significant role in bringing about this state of affairs. But, as should already be clear, his doctrine could never have become established without the support of the psychiatric establishment. There can be no doubt at all that it received this support in America largely because of the influence of one man - Freud. FREUD'S FALSE MEMORIES 513 The reason that Freud's influence in this area was so pernicious is readily apparent. In the theory of the Oedipus complex Freud had, in effect, invented a perfect theoretical instrument for explaining away allegations of sexual abuse and undermining their credibility. Since Freud's theory held that all children might fantasise about sexual relations with their parents, it followed that recollections of sexual abuse by parents could be construed as fantasies. Even though Freud himself specifically pointed out on a number of occasions that mem- ories of childhood seductions sometimes did correspond to real events, the overwhelming tendency of the psychoanalytic profession through- out most of the twentieth century has been to construe recollections of incest as fantasies. In this respect, at least, psychoanalysis in general and the theory of the Oedipus complex in particular have caused untold harm.3 The harm which they have caused would not be so surprising if it were widely known how Freud came to formulate the Oedipus complex in the first place. As I have already noted, the generally accepted version, related by Ernest Jones, is that during his self-analysis Freud unearthed a 'memory' of an occasion when, as a child, he had been sexually aroused by seeing his mother naked. It may well be that Jones was faithfully recording what Freud himself had told him. But there is no evidence whatsoever that the scene ever took place. For, as we have already seen, what Freud actually wrote at the time was that he remembered a train journey - a long train journey from whose duration he deduced that he might have had the opportunity of seeing his mother naked. He then speculated further that he might have been sexually aroused by this entirely hypothetical sight. Although Freud may eventually have come to experience the scene he had ingeniously con- structed as a "memory', it would seem that it was almost certainly a false memory. 4 Freud's false memory, however, was instrumental in creating a cli mate of tyrannical scepticism about incest and child abuse which would remain almost unchallenged throughout most of the century. Only in the last twenty years has it become possible to oppose this climate effectively. This is almost entirely due to the influence of feminism. For during the late royos and the early 1980s many feminist writers and therapists began to recognise the frequency with which real cases of sexual abuse were subject to denial. Quite deliberately they started to draw back the veil of patriarchy and to reveal the reality which had been concealed behind it. AFTERWORD 514 Women who had been sexually abused by their fathers, who had always remembered this, but who had kept the shameful secret to themselves, began to talk about their experience, or to recount their stories in books. Some women also began to disclose their histories of sexual abuse to psychotherapists who, almost for the first time, were prepared to listen to their stories and to believe them. This new devel. opment in American psychotherapy in its turn generated more books. In 1981 the Harvard University Press published Father-Daughter Incest by the psychiatrist Judith Herman, in which she persuasively argued that the incidence of this form of incest was much greater than had ever been suspected. These were immense positive gains and they were brought about almost entirely by women - by women who were rebelling against the patriarchal straitjacket of Freud and psychoanalysis. It should be noted that most of these early pioneers were not seeking to recover repressed memories of child sexual abuse. They were seeking to create a safe space in which memories which had always been present could be disclosed by women, without being met by scepticism and denial. If that is so we might well ask how it was that a movement which had its origins in a feminist rebellion against Freud, in an attempt to draw the veil of silence from memories which had never been repressed, should eventually have come to rely more and more on the most sacred of all Freudian doctrines - that of repression. One answer to this question is provided by Judith Herman in her 1981 book. In this book she makes her quarrel with Freud's patriar- chalism and with the tyranny of his Oedipus complex abundantly clear. Yet, like countless critics of Freud both before and after her, she is unable to resist the massive potency of the Freud legend. Instead of escaping entirely from the influence of Freud, Herman actually found the authority for her rebellion against orthodox psychoanalysis in the writings of Freud himself. For she believed that she had discovered another, unknown Freud. This Freud, the Freud of 18g6 and of the seduction theory, could be seen as a kind of proto-feminist. Instead of rejecting stories of incest as fantasies, he had listened to the women who had told these stories with respect and understanding: The patriarch of modern psychology stumbled across the incest secret in the early and formative years of his career. It was Freud's ambition to discover the cause of hysteria, the archetypal female neurosis of his time. In his early investigations, he pained the trust and confidence of FREUd'S FALSE MEMORIES 515 many women, who revealed their troubles to him. Time after time, Freud's patients, women from prosperous, conventional families, unbur- deed painful memories of childhood sexual encounters with men they had trusted: family friends, relatives and fathers. Freud initially believed his patients and recognised the force of their confessions. But Freud, according to Herman's account, eventually recoiled from the implications of his seduction theory, and chose to incriminate daughters for their incestuous fantasies rather than fathers for their incestuous deeds. 'At the moment that Freud turned his back on his female patients and denied the truth of their experience,' writes Herman, 'he forfeited his ambition to understand the female neurosis. Freud went on to elaborate the dominant psychology of modern times. It is a psychology of men.' Judith Herman was not the first person to put forward this view of Freud. She herself refers back to the very similar view taken by the social worker, Florence Rush, in an article written in 1974. Another version of the same argument would, of course, soon be put forward in 1984 amidst massive publicity and controversy by Jeffrey Masson in his book The Assault on Truth. Masson, as we know, had trained as a psychoanalyst and was himself seeking to escape from orthodox Freudian doctrine. The abiding temp- tation for those caught in this kind of predicament is to submit to the authority of a new messiah in order to find the strength to rebel against the tyranny of the old one. That, in a sense, is what Jeffrey Masson, in spite of all his best intentions, found himself doing. Except that in this case the messiah through which he sought liberation from the patriarchal doctrines of Freud was none other than Freud himself. For, like Judith Herman, Masson too discovered a proto-feminist Freud apparently unmarked by the patriarchalism of orthodox psycho- analysis. In words which have already been quoted, he wrote of this carly period in Freud's career that Freud's female patients had the courage to face what had happened to them in childhood - often this included violent scenes of rape by a father - and to communicate their traumas to Freud ... Freud listened and understood and gave them permission to remember and speak of these terrible events.' Masson of course went on to argue, as Judith Herman had before him, that Freud eventually turned his back on the 'truth' he had discovered because of the fear, distaste and outrage of his colleagues.? This argument about Freud and the abandonment of the seduction 516 AFTERWORD theory has, especially in Masson's well-known version of it, exerted an enormous influence over the way American psychotherapy has developed over the last ten years. Yet, as I have suggested in the main body of this book, it is an argument which fundamentally misrepresents the actual course of Freud's development and the entire nature of his early 'discovery', For the proto-feminist Freud which both Judith Herman and Jeffrey Masson thought they had discovered never existed. Both Herman and Masson imply that Freud's early patients - those he discusses in his paper The Aetiology of Hysteria' - came to consult him burdened with memories of incest which they then spontaneously disclosed. There is no mystery about why Herman and Masson should have assumed this, because Freud himself said that this was what had happened. As we had come to him and told him stories of sexual abuse and how he had begun by believing these stories. It may well be that Freud had, by the time thirty years or so had elapsed, come to believe in this version of events himself. He may have 'remembered' this happening. But if this was Freud's memory of events then, once again, we are forced to recognise that it was a 'false memory'. For in his original 1896 paper Freud had made it abundantly clear that when his early patients came to him they had no memories of incest at all. Since they are so crucial, Freud's exact words should perhaps be quoted again: Before they come for analysis,' he writes, "the patients know nothing about these scenes.' How then, did these patients know what kind of scenes they were expected to reproduce? Freud himself, it will be recalled, implicitly answers this question. 'They are indignant as a rule,' he writes, "if we warn them that such scenes are going to emerge.' It was thus evidently Freud's habit to inform his patients of the kind of scenes he expected to emerge. But if his patients were indignant when they were told they were going to reproduce scenes of child sexual abuse, how did Freud persuade them to do this? Once again Freud himself gives us the answer. 'Only the strongest compulsion of the treatment can induce them to embark on a reproduction of them.' The phrase 'the strongest compulsion of the treatment' is a telling one. We have all experienced "the strongest compulsion of the treatment' at one time or another, if only when we have been forced to take medicine whose taste we did not like. Freud, we must recall once again, was not originally a psycho- FREUD'S FALSE MEMORIES 517 therapist. He was a physician. He believed - especially at this point in his career - that he was dispensing a kind of medicine. His theoretical speculations had led him to the conclusion that "hysteria' was a single disease, and that the 'pathogen' which caused it was repressed sexual abuse. His task was to persuade patients to reproduce the pathogenic memories which, according to his theories, were lodged in a submerged part of their minds. Freud's duty, then, was not to treat the patient. it was to cure the disease. The way to do this was to persuade the patient to 'remember' scenes of childhood sexual abuse. If they declined, it was his job, as a conscientious physician, to use his 'pressure technique and to make sure that they followed the treatment he pre- scribed. For, as he writes, 'We must insist on this, we must repeat the pressure and represent ourselves as infallible, till at least we are really told something.' There is no evidence that any of the patients who came to Freud without memories of sexual abuse had ever suffered from such abuse. But, as a growing number of Freud scholars have recognised in recent years, and as I have argued in this book, there is a great deal of evidence, most of it in Freud's own frank and astonishing words, that he went out of his way to persuade, encourage, cajole and sometimes bully his female patients to reproduce scenes of child sexual abuse which he himself had reconstructed from their symptoms or their associations. Freud's manner of treating his early women patients was not essentially different from the manner he treated his later ones. For in both cases his theories denied women autonomy and declined to validate their own experiences and their own memories. Whereas his later theories led countless psychoanalysts to persuade women who had been abused to believe that they had not, Freud himself had, under the influence of his early theories, frequently tried to persuade women who had not been abused to believe that they had. In short, in his disregard for his temale patients' autonomy and their right to psychological selt- determination, Freud was just as much the nineteenth-century patri arch before he abandoned the seduction theory as he was afterwards. In failing to understand the deep consistency of Freud's patriar- chalism and, in implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) holding up the Carly Freud as a model of therapeutic wisdom and sensitivity, Masson, Herman and all those who shared their views were in effect com- mending not a decisive break with Freud's patriarchalism but a return to its earliest form. 518 AFTERWORD It has sometimes been suggested by commentators on the incest sur- vivors' movement that the concept of repression was a relatively late ingredient. In as much as this movement appears to have started outside the realm of psychotherapy, there may be some truth in this. But although both Herman and Masson give the impression that Freud's early patients were able quite spontaneously to gain access to their memories of being sexually abused, they appear simultaneously to accept Freud's original assumption that such memories might be entirely repressed. It is clear that in 1981, when her book Father-Daughter Incest first appeared, Judith Herman was already placing some reliance on psychotherapeutic reconstructions of sexual abuse, as opposed to spontaneous memories. She describes how one woman patient was helped during therapy to reconstruct 'previously repressed memories' of sexual assaults by her father. According to the account we are given, from the age of six until mid-adolescence her father had repeatedly exhibited himself to her and insisted that she masturbate him. It is implied that she had entirely lost any memory of almost ten years of repeated sexual abuse until it was pieced together in psychotherapy.? Even before the publication of Jeffrey Mason's book in 1984, a number of psychotherapists in the Boston area and elsewhere began to form therapy groups for incest survivors. It would seem that in these very early days of the incest survivors' movement, most of those who enrolled in these therapy groups were victims of incest who had always remembered their abuse. In their groups they shared their experience with others, and undoubtedly felt stronger and more secure as a result of doing so. But the very fact that Freud, and Freud's early theories, had played such a crucial role in shaping the incest survivors' movement during this period meant that the possibility of repressed memories of incest could never be ruled out. From the descriptions we have of them, it is clear that some of these early therapy groups also included women who had no memories of incest but who had been diagnosed by their psychotherapists or psychiatrists as suffering from repressed memories of incest. In their pursuit of the hidden memories which supposedly accounted for the symptoms of these women, therapists sometimes used a form of time-limited group therapy. At the beginning of the ten or twelve weekly sessions, patients would be encouraged to set themselves goals. For many patients without memories of incest the goal was to recover such memories. Indeed they evidently felt under considerable group-pressure to do so and thus prove their right to FREUD'S FALSE MEMORIES 519 belong to the group. 'Women who wished to recover memories, were often preoccupied with obsessive doubt about ... whether they belonged to the group at all.' Some of them actually defined their goal by saying 'I just want to be in the group and feel I belong?' After the fifth session the therapist would remind the group that they had reached the middle of their therapy, with the clear implication that time was running out. As pressure was increased in this way women with no memories would often begin to see images of sexual abuse involving fathers or other adults, and these images would then be construed as memories or 'flashbacks' 10 One need not be particularly sceptical about the recovered memory movement in order to recognise that what was happening here was that distressed and vulnerable women with no memories of sexual abuse, and no reason to believe they had been abused other than their therapist's diagnosis, were being placed under immense psychological pressure to produce 'memories' which would confirm that diagnosis. It is equally clear, however, that the therapists running the group were quite unable to see that they, like the pre-psychoanalytic Freud on whom they had modelled themselves, were actually dispensing an extremely coercive form of therapy. Instead they evidently saw each instance of a woman recovering putative memories of sexual abuse as a vindication of their original diagnosis, and as scientific proof of the theory of massive repression - a form of repression which was first named by Judith Herman in a speech made to the American Psychiatric Association in 1985.1 Group therapy sessions of the kind I have described here were ostensibly designed to empower the women who joined them as patients. We should not rule out the possibility that, in some cases, this is exactly what they did, or appeared to do. It would seem, however, that one of their other effects was to induce a massive sense of empowerment in the psychiatrists and psychotherapists who ran them. This sense of empowerment was spread rapidly through informal net- works of psychotherapists at the same time that it began to be dissemi- nated formally through seminars, books and academic papers. A movement which appears to have begun in the Boston area thus soon started to spread throughout the entire United States. There can be little doubt that its spread was very significantly accel- rated by the appearance of Jeffrey Masson's book The Assault on Truth in igB4. For, in the concluding pages of this book, Masson suggested that psychoanalysts had spent the twentieth century progressively AFTERWORD 520 erasing what he took to be Freud's original insight. Consequently most American psychoanalysts did not now recognise what, according to Masson, was implicit in Freud's 1896 paper. They did not therefore accept that 'many (probably most) of their patients had violent and unhappy childhoods, not because of some defect in their character, but because of something terrible which had been done to them by their parents.' Masson went on to make clear that he was talking specifically about the sexual abuse of children by their parents. He suggested that sexual abuse might 'form the core of every serious neurosis', and that if this is so, "it would not be possible to achieve a successful cure of a neurosis if this central event were ignored.' What Masson comes very near to saying here is that all, or nearly all, serious cases of neurosis have one single underlying cause - child sexual abuse and that orthodox psychoanalysts were collectively engaged in a massive denial of this reality. By implication Masson now calls for an equally massive collective effort to retrieve these painful memories of incest. 'Free and honest retrieval of painful memories, he writes, "can- not occur in the face of scepticism and fear of the truth.' In the thunderous closing paragraphs of his book Masson makes his appeal quite explicit: The time has come to cease hiding from what is, after all, one of the great issues of human history. If it is not possible for the therapeutic community to address this serious issue in an honest and open-minded manner, then it is time for their patients to stop subjecting themselves to needless repetition of their deepest and earliest sorrow.12 By writing this, Masson was issuing an ideological ultimatum to the entire American psychotherapeutic community. What he was saying, in effect, was this; 'Face up to the reality of incest and to the fact that, as Freud himself originally maintained, hidden memories of child sexual abuse are the root cause of your patients' symptoms, and allow your patients to retrieve these memories in therapy. Otherwise your patients will leave you. The corollary of this view was implied but never stated: 'If you do not have the courage and honesty to allow repressed memories of incest to emerge, your patients will leave you and find other psychotherapists who do. It Jeffrey Masson had been the only person preaching this new understanding of Freud to the psychotherapeutic community his ult- FREUD's FALSE MEMORIES 521 matum might have had relatively little effect. But Masson, as can now be seen, was in reality part of a broad historical movement. A number of writers and therapists, including Judith Herman in Boston and other therapists and psychiatrists elsewhere, were preaching a very similar gospel. The best way to understand the immensely powerful dynamic of this new psychotherapeutic movement is, I believe, to translate its battle-cry out of its modern secular register and into an older register which is more deeply rooted in our culture. For what Judith Herman, Jeffrey Masson and others were saying was something like this: Woe to you orthodox psychoanalysts, you Pharisees. For you have whitened the sepulchre of your patients' unconscious and you have turned your eyes away from the evil and corruption which lie within. Woe to you psychoanalysts, you generation of vipers! Repent of your ways and be saved. For only those who follow the one true Freud, whom others have concealed, but whom I have revealed, will be healed and redeemed at the end. But all those who do not believe will suffer for their dis- belief. For their patients shall leave them. And they shall be flung into the burning lake of therapeutic despair, where they will be tormented for all eternity.' Quite how this gospel was spread will probably never be known with accuracy. For it was spread not only by books but in the way that new gospels often are - by word of mouth, and by example. It was spread through informal networks of psychotherapists, and by thera- pists who met in coffee-breaks, in conferences or in workshops. As a result it spread rapidly. What made its progress initially uncheckable was the ease with which it proved possible to implant, or create through suggestion, 'memories' of incest in women who had previously had no recollection of being abused. Therapists unfamiliar with the malleabil- ity of human memory, treated the extraordinary and vivid 'memories' which their patients now began to construct as proof that 'massive repression' could and did take place. Before very long the belief that repressed memories of child sexual abuse were the cause of most serious neuroses, especially in women, began to be embraced by particular groups and sub-cultures of psycho- therapists and psychiatrists all over the United States. It was embraced not only by many new-wave therapists, hypnotherapists and bodywork- ers, but by some old-wave psychoanalytically trained therapists and by a number of young psychoanalysts. It was also sometimes embraced by reputable psychiatrists and even neurologists. A number of psychiatric AFTERWORD 522 conditions whose etiology remained obscure were now held by some clinicians to be the result of sexual abuse during childhood. Seemingly sophisticated studies appeared purporting to demonstrate this aetiology.13 Nor was the diagnosis of child abuse invoked only to explain psychi- atric disorders. One recent academically serious contribution to what might be called post-Massonian psychoanalytic theory presents a table entitled Childhood Symptoms of Sexual Abuse'. This includes a sec- tion headed 'Changes in School Performance', which specifies the following possible indicators of sexual abuse: Falling grades Decreased interest in school Difficulty concentrating School Phobial+ This is only a small example of the manner in which symptom lists, offered as aids to the diagnosis of repressed memories of sexual abuse, have proliferated within certain sub-cultures of American psycho- therapy in recent years. The only certain conclusion which can be drawn from studying such lists is that there is by now practically no form of negative or mildly anxious human behaviour, from fear of the dark to neglecting to brush your teeth, which has not been cited by American therapists in recent years as a possible indicator or symptom of the existence of repressed memories of child sexual abuse. IS Once it began to be accepted by some therapists and counsellors well and truly under way, and before very long patients who had never had any recollection of being abused were emerging from therapy with detailed and graphic 'memories' of how they had been sexually abused in childhood. 16 Many large bookshops in America have entire sections devoted to "Recovery'. A growing proportion of the books in such sections deal with incest and many are about repressed memories and the therapeutic recovery of such 'memories'. By far the most important of these is The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivers of Child Sexual Abuse, written by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis. One way of conveying the sheer size and power of the recovery movement in America is simply to register the fact that The Courage to Heal, published in 1988, has FREUD'S FALSE MEMORIES 523 now sold more than 750,000 copies in the United States alone. The Courage to Heal has been described as the Bible of the recovered memory movement. If we are to understand the enormous impact that this book has had on North American history in the last decade I believe that this description should be treated very seriously indeed. Because ultimately, as I have tried to show in this brief appendix to my central argument, the recovered memory movement, although it may be supported by some feminists, does not belong to the cause of liberation. It is essentially a patriarchal movement, which can be traced back to the sternest patriarch and prophet of modern psychology Freud. Its doctrines are remarkably similar to those of other move- ments of Puritan revivalism, and it is largely because of this that it has swept through Puritan North America, not against the tide of Christian fundamentalism but in alliance with it. For in some communities women have been encouraged to recover 'memories' of incest almost as frequently by ministers of religion or Christian counsellors as they have by secular psychotherapists. As is the case with the leading figures in almost all revivalist move- ments, there can be no doubting the genuineness of Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, and the utter sincerity of their belief that their book will facilitate healing and psychological wholeness. But just as more traditional revivalists have always proceeded by vitalising the anxieties and the sense of sin of those they seek to convert, so Bass and Davis encourage their readers to search their own memories for dark and shameful secrets which, they are told, may have been completely hidden by the power of repression. Sexual abuse in childhood has, in effect, become the new Original Sin in Puritan America, and one of the aims of The Courage to Heal is to help women who have no memories of being sexually abused in childhood to "find' such memories. The entire book is in one respect a literary surrogate for, or supplement to, the kind of time-limited survivor group therapy sessions which I have already described. With the help of The Courage to Heal and of therapists who believe in the possibility of 'massive repression', hundreds of thousands of women have recovered 'memories' of being raped, or sexually abused repeat- edly and for long periods during their childhood. As yet no external evidence has been produced which convincingly demonstrates that any therapeutically recovered 'memory' of repeated and sustained sexual abuse actually corresponds to real episodes of sexual abuse. In early editions of The Courage to Heal, however, readers are never cautioned AFTERWORD 524 about the dangerous inaccuracy of most recovered memories'. Instead proper caution is replaced by credulity. 'If you think you were abused write Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, and your lite shows the symptoms, then you were.'7 Bass and Davis encourage women to engage in fantasies of ven. geance against the people they believe they were abused by. You may dream of murder or castration,' they write. 'It can be pleasurable to Fantasize such scenes in vivid detail. What is perhaps even more sig- nificant is that, disregarding the need for corroborative evidence, The Courage to Heal encourages women to consider using their artificially constructed 'memories' as grounds for confronting their supposed abu- sers and denouncing them - even, if necessary, accusing their own parents or grandparents on their death-beds,18 The deep hostility towards the family and towards family relation- ships which is expressed in certain parts of The Courage to Heal has sometimes been construed as evidence of the liberating and truly 'rad- ical' nature of the doctrines espoused by its authors. To take this view, however, is to betray the very innocence of cultural and religious history on which the recovered memory movement thrives. For it is one of the most notable features of repressive patriarchal ideologies that, in their original revivalist phases, they have tended to show a contemptuous disregard for the bonds of affection which exist within even the most troubled families. The clearest example of such an atti- tude is that which is found in the New Testament itself, in the words attributed in Luke's gospel to Jesus: If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple (Luke 14:26 AV). The literal sense of these words has frequently been repudiated by Christians, especially in modern times. Yet the particular form of contempts mundi which they express has helped to sustain the entire Western monastic tradition. Partly because of the strength of this tradition, and the subsequent secularisation of the monastic virtues by Puritanism, the sentiments expressed in Luke's words have been deeply internalised into our culture. The resulting climate of feeling has always tended to facilitate the growth of repressive cults and revivalist movements which actively disseminate hostility to the family. The FREUD'S FALSE MEMORIES 525 Courage to Heal is perhaps best understood as the central text of one such revivalist movement, Like any other movement of patriarchal revivalist Puritanism the effect of the recovered memory movement has been not to liberate women but to subjugate them, and to encourage dependence and defer- ence to doctrines they are expected to accept unquestioningly - in this case to doctrines derived directly or indirectly from Freud - the true Freud which others had concealed, but which a number of modern scholars claim to have revealed. The most disturbing feature of the recovered memory movement is the manner in which it encourages an attitude of emotional coldness and cruelty between different generations. Almost as disturbing as this, however, is the role it has played in the deepening sex war which has been fought out with increasing bitterness in recent years, particularly in America. Although some observers who are unsympathetic to femin- ism see the issues in this war as entirely synthetic, I cannot share this view. It is clear that many women have suffered immensely as a result of orthodox psychoanalysts construing real episodes of sexual abuse as Oedipal fantasies. To this extent the recovered memory movement was actually born out of a reaction against some of the tyrannical assumptions of psychoanalysis. The terrible irony, as I have tried to show, is that some of the key doctrines in this attempt to rebel against the patriarchalism of psychoanalysis have themselves been drawn from the original oppressor. For the notion that Freud based his seduction theory on real instances of sexual abuse has become the foundation myth of the entire recovered memory movement."' Pro- ponents of this movement are, in effect, fighting Freud's second delusion by taking refuge in his first delusion. In some cases at least they are doing something very similar to what Freud was doing to his own patients during the period he formulated his seduction theory they are forcing their own theoretical preconceptions onto young and psychologically vulnerable women in a way which creates dependence in the patient and feelings of empowerment in the therapist. Freud's patriarchal bullying can, when viewed sceptically, be recognised quite casily for what it is. It is much more difficult for us to recognise that the same kind of misogyny has now actually been taken over by a small section of the feminist movement and is being deployed by women against women, in the name of liberation and 'healing'. It does, however, seem reasonably clear that those who support the recovered memory movement either in its 'low-church' self-help form, AFTERWORD 526 or in its more scholarly form, are playing into the hands of those they ostensibly oppose - the repressive men (and women) who seek to deny that child abuse occurs at all. In 1992, in a new edition of The Assault on Truth, Jeffrey Masson wrote that 'society has belatedly come to recognise that the sexual abuse of children is real, widespread, seri- ous, and long-silenced.?0 Such growing awareness should be wel- comed. Yet the danger is that whatever progress has been made in this direction will be undone by the reaction against recovered memory therapy and the multiple injustices it has helped to perpetrate. In this respect the recovered memory movement itself poses a threat to the victims of genuine sexual abuse, who may now once again find them- selves disbelieved. There is a particular danger that the sheer number of false accusations which have been made may lead some people to conclude that all memories of sexual abuse which emerge during therapy are false. This is clearly not the case. Some people who enter therapy may choose to talk about their experience of sexual abuse for the simple reason that their therapist is the first person they have met who has allowed them to do so without feeling shame and embar- rassment. What remains critically important, however, is that thera- pists should distinguish carefully between episodes of sexual abuse which have always been remembered, and of whose reality the client has never been in doubt, and the retrieval (whether spontaneous or otherwise) of so-called 'repressed memories' of abuse. It is in the latter area that scepticism is not only desirable but necessary. For, contrary to a belief which is held by many therapists, there is no evidence that any past events, whether or not they involve sexual contact, can be reliably reconstructed on the basis of 'repressed memories'. Therapists who seek either to elicit, or to 'validate' repressed memories of any kind are not respecting the autonomy of their patients. They are lend- ing their authority to intrinsically unsafe therapeutic techniques which, by misrepresenting past relationships or events, can cause great emo- tional harm both to patients and their families. One of the problems associated with attempts to counter the recent upsurge of accusations based on recovered memories is that the under- lying therapeutic assumptions in such cases are not recent at all. Neither do they belong just to the fringes of the psychotherapeutic movement. To understand why this is so it is not sufficient merely to recognise that the Freud of r8g6 was a recovered memory therapist in the modern sense of the term. The crucial point, as Frederick Crews has put it in a recent, as-yet-unpublished article, is that 'he remained one FREUd's FALSE MEMORIES 527 thereafter, only substituting relatively trivial primal scenes and Oedipal wishes for the molestations which formerly made up the content of the repressed? These words go to the heart of the dilemma which now faces dynamic psychotherapy. For what they call upon us to acknowl- edge is that when Freud renounced his seduction theory in 187 he was not bravely abandoning a cherished theory because of the evidence, as some have claimed. Rather he was seeking to retain his theory of repression and the clinical practices associated with it in spite of the fact that they had repeatedly led to erroneous conclusions. When Freud subsequently sought to persuade Dora that she had masturbated even though she had no recollection of doing so, when he successfully persuaded his daughter Anna that she had indulged in sado-masochistic daydreams whose details she had repressed, and when, by interpreting a dream, he sought to persuade the Wolf Man that, at the age of eighteen months, he had witnessed his parents copulating a tergo three times in an afternoon, he remained just as much a recovered memory therapist as he had been in 1806. The main difference was that by generally refraining from reconstructing sexual crimes (which inevitably involved other people), and by focusing instead on events, impulses or ideas which were uncontroversial, private or unwitnessed, Freud ensured that his theory of repression could not be easily tested and became in practice unfalsifiable. When psychotherapists in the 1980s, influenced by Judith Herman, Jeffrey Masson and others, began to turn the psychoanalytic clock back to 1896, they were not introducing a fundamentally different form of therapy. They were in effect reversing Freud's flight from falsifiability and exposing his theory of repression to exactly the kind of tests which he had fled from in 1897. When, as a result, evidence which called this theory into question began to accumulate, and to be collected by the False Memory Societies in both Britain and America, many mainstream psychoanalytically oriented therapists took comfort in the thought that the therapeutic practices which were being discredited were both exotic and aberrant. Few if any orthodox analysts were able to face up to the fact that the theory which was being tested and found wanting was intimately related to the theory of repression which informed their own clinical practice. It is this predicament which has made it so difficult for many main- stream psychotherapists and professional organisations either to under- stand the 'recovered memory movement' or to oppose it effectively. Again and again they have attempted to portray recovered memory 528 AFTERWORD therapy as an alien intruder into a therapeutic tradition which is essen- tally sound. Again and again, while counselling others to confront their past, they have resisted facing up to the history of psychotherapy itself and to the oppressive influence still exercised over it by the founder of psychoanalysis. The social and sexual conflict which has been caused by recovered memory therapy is already considerable. My impression is that this very serious conflict is likely to continue unless we can face up to the disturbing history of psychoanalysis and to the cultural influences which shaped it. For only if we do this, is it likely that we can begin to grasp how pervasive and powerful patriarchal attitudes are, and how easy it is for those who genuinely and courageously seek liberation from them to become ensnared by them themselves. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE One of the most trenchant and significant contributions to the debate on recovered memory therapy can be found in Frederick Crews's The Memory Wars. Crews's warning against what he calls 'middle-of-the-road extremism' (p. 249) is, I believe, particularly apt. For the idea that in every fierce debate the truth must lie 'somewhere in the middle' is always dangerous. Fortunately there are a number of works which implicitly recognise this. These include Lawrence Wright's immensely valuable book, Remembering Satan, and two lucid and powerful studies of recovered memory therapy, Making Monsters, by Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters and The Myth of Repressed Memory, by Elizabeth Lofts and Katherine Ketcham. But perhaps the most comprehensive study of the recovered memory movement is Mark Penderg- rast's Victims of Memory. Pendergrast writes as an accused parent who is also an investigative journalist. His book, richly documented and informed throughout by a sense of history, is both wise and profound. Perhaps the most striking testimony to its power is that of Joan Kennedy Taylor, National Coordinator of the Association of Libertarian Feminists in America. Reading Pendergrast's book as somebody who believed that memories of sexual abuse were often repressed until unearthed by special therapeutic techniques, she found this assumption turned upside down. I cannot remember ever before, " she writes, both admiring the research in a book and being moved to tears by it. " Joan Kennedy Taylor's words convey the character of Mark Pendergrast's book well. Although it may seem inconsiderate of an author to end a very long book by recommending to his readers that they read another long book, Victims of Memory is such an unusual work that I feel I should not refrain from doing just this. NOTES (PP. 445-9) 607 11. Gilbert Adair The Sunday Times, y May 1093. As Adair's words imply, the moderate scepticism implicit in pluralism has, in recent years, increasingly been overshadowed by the more extreme forms of scepticism associated with structuralism and post-structuralism. One of the most comprehensive and astute critiques of postmodern theory and its effects on modern intellectual culture is provided by Brian Vickers in his Appropriating Shakespeare: Contem porary Critical Quarrels, Yale University Press, 1903. 12. Frederick Crews, Skeptical Engagements, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, p. xi. 13. Crews, p. xvill. 14 Ted Hughes, 'Myth and Education' (1976) in Ted Hughes, Winter Pollen; Occasional Prose, Faber, 1994, p. 146. 15. R. Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Moderm Science, Scottish Academic Press, 1972, p. xi 16. On the specific association between Puritanism and modern science, see Robert K. Merton, 'Puritanism, Pietism, and Science' (1936), reprinted in C. A. Russell (ed.), Science and Religious Belief: A Selection of Recent Historical Studies, University of London Press Ltd, 1973. For a discussion of the same issue see also A. Rupert Hall's 'Merton Revisited' (1963) and Douglas S. Kemsley's 'Religious Influences in the Rise of Modern Science' (1968), reprinted in the same volume; R. Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science, Scottish Academic Press, 1972; P. M. Rattansi, 'The Social Interpret- ation of Science in the Seventeenth Century' in Peter Mathias (ed.), Science and Society 1600-1900, Cambridge University Press, 1972. These essays reveal considerable areas of disagreement among historians. Many of these disagree- ments, however, arise out of over-specific claims which disregard the fact that seventeenth-century Puritanism was merely one manifestation of a particular form of Judaeo-Christian rigorism which finds expression elsewhere both in the Jewish and in the Catholic tradition. It is perhaps Max Weber who, looking back on the history of monasticism from the perspective of the Reformation, focuses the issues best and illuminates the essentially religious origins of the frame of mind idealised by Western rationalism: The life of the saint was directed solely towards a transcendental end, salvation. But precisely for that reason it was thoroughly rationalised in this world and dominated entirely by the aim to add to the glory of God on earth... Only a life guided by constant thought could achieve conquest over the state of nature. Descartes' cogito ergo sum was taken over by the contemporary Puritans with this ethical reinterpretation. It was this rationalisation which gave the Reformed faith its peculiar ascetic tendency, and is the basis both of its relationship to and its conflict with Catholicism. For naturally similar things were not unknown to Catholicism. Without doubt Christian asceticism, both outwardly and in its inner meaning, contains many different things. But it has had a definitely rational character in its highest Occidental forms as early as the Middle Ages, and in several forms even in antiquity. The great historical 608 NOTES (P. 449) significance of Western monasticism, as contrasted with that of the Orient, is based on this fact, not in all cases, but in its general type. In the rules of St Benedict, still more with the monks of Cluny, again with the Cistercians, and most strongly the Jesuits, it had become emancipated from planless otherworldliness and irrational self-torture, It had developed a systematic method of rational conduct with the purpose of overcoming the status nature, to free man from the power of irrational impulses and his dependence on the world and on nature. It attempted to subject man to the supremacy of a purposeful will, to bring his actions under constant self-control with a careful consider- ation of their ethical consequences. Thus it trained the monk, objec- tively, as a worker in the service of the kingdom of God, and thereby further, subjectively, assured the salvation of his soul. This active self- control, which formed the end of the exercitia of St Ignatius and of the rational monastic virtues everywhere, was also the most important practical ideal of Puritanism ... The Puritan, like every rational type of asceticism, tried to enable a man to maintain and act on his constant motives, especially those which it taught him itself, against the emotions.. Contrary to many popular ideas, the end of this asceticism was to be able to lead an alert, intelligent life: the most urgent task the destruction of spon- taneous, impulsive enjoyment, the most important means was to bring order into the conduct of its adherents. All these important points are empha- sised as strongly in the rules of Catholic monasticism as in the principles of conduct of the Calvinists (italics added] (Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Allen and Unwin, 1930, Pp. 118-19). On the ethos of Puritanism one of the best sources is R. H. Tawney's classic Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Penguin, 1938. On the general question of the psychological correlates of intellectual specialisation, there can be no better introduction than the work of Liam Hudson. Hudson's first two books in particular are rich storehouses of evidence, insight and careful inference. See Liam Hudson, Contrary Imaginations: A Psychological Study of the English Schoolboy, Methuen, 1966, Frames of Mind: Ability, Perception and Self-Perception in the Arts and the Sciences, Methuen, 1968. See also Liam Hudson (ed.), The Ecology of Human Intelligence, Penguin, 1970, and David C. McClelland, The Roots of Consciousmess, Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1964, especially Chap- ter 7, "The Psychodynamics of Creative Scientists', pp. 146-81. 17. Bryan Appleyard, Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man, Picador, 1992. 18. Raymond Tallis, Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory, Macmillan, 1988; Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, Descartes' Dream: The World According to Mathematics, Penguin, 1990, p. 283. 19. Huxley, quoted in Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin, Michael Joseph, 1991, P. 491. 20. Medawar, Limits, p. 66. 21. Medawar, Limits, p. 66. 22. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Paladin, 1978, p. I. NOTES (PP. 453-8) 609 23. Dawkins, p. I. 14- Stephen Hawking, 1 Brief History of Time, Bantam, 1988, pp. 13, 175. 135: Gerald Edelman, Bright dir, Brilliant Pite: On the Matter of the Mind, Penguin, 26. See Steven Rose, The Making of Memory, Bantam, pp. 88, 317. CHAPTER TWENTY-TwO PSYCHOANALYTIC MACHINE THE GHOST IN THE 1. C. D. Darlington, quoted in T. H. Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving: The Evol- ution of the Human Species, Yale University Press, 1962, p. 54. It should be said that one of the factors which has made it easier for some theorists to put forward extreme versions of genetic determinism successfully has been the biological naivety of many social scientists in the first half of the twentieth century. In what has been called the 'Standard Social Science Model', championed by many influential anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists, including Margaret Mead and J. B. Watson, human nature was held to be almost infinitely malleable. Human beings were treated as though they were biologically empty, their behaviour and temperament being almost entirely the product of culture. It was the extremism of this argument, and its steadfast disregard for the biological evidence, which made it much easier for sociobiologists such as Edward O. Wilson to gain a hearing for their theories in the 19yos and 1980s. Partly because of the fierceness with which these theories were in turn attacked by other biologists, the extreme varieties of genetic determinism common a few decades ago are now much less promi- nent. They have been replaced, in part at least, by the arguments of evolution- ary psychologists and other Darwinians - arguments which are both more moderate-seeming and, sometimes at least, more sophisticated. An excellent example of this more nuanced approach has been provided by the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. In his book The Language Instinct he argues cogently for the view that the human capacity for language is a part of our genetic endowment and that it is associated with the evolution through natural selection of specialised neural networks within the brain. Not only does he argue this position powerfully and persuasively, but he also mounts an effective attack on the 'Standard Social Science Model' of human nature. All but the most sceptical readers of his book are likely to be persuaded that the capacity for language has, at least in some respects, been genetically programmed into the human brain throughout the many millennia of the evolution of our species. All but the most recalcitrant will concede that Pinker's broadside against the 'Standard Social Science Model' has some justification. For it would seem almost beyond question that twentieth- century social scientists have, for ideological or rationalistic motives, tended to underestimate grossly the extent to which human nature is shaped and constrained by genetic factors. To say all this, however, is not to accept Pinker's argument in its entirety. One of the most questionable parts of his book is that in which he uses his bIO NOTES (P. 458) carefully worked out argument about language as the basis for a series of speculations about other specialised neural networks which he believes may have evolved within the human brain. He suggests that there may be 'innate modules' or "families of instincts' for many facets of human behaviour includ. ing 'intuitive mechanics: knowledge of the motions, forces, and deformations that objects undergo and 'intuitive biology. He even suggests that there may be a brain module for 'justice' through which human beings inherit a specific neural basis for a 'sense of rights, obligations and deserts' (p. 420). Not all Pinker's guesses about the genetic make-up of human nature should, I believe, be dismissed out of hand. But the suggestion that there may be something which resembles a 'gene for justice' is one which many will find alarming. One of the great dangers of indulging in this kind of genetic guesswork is that what Pinker presents as speculation will be treated by others as science. Unsubstantiated speculations such as those he presents only play into the hands of those who advocate the kind of extreme genetic determinism whose excesses Pinker himself generally manages to avoid. In particular they are liable to lend support to a tendency which seems to be widespread among biologically orientated thinkers who make pronouncements about human nature - the tendency to assume that the aspects of human behaviour which can be shown to be genetically determined are the 'real' substratum of human nature, and that what is added by nurture is little more than a superficial cultural 'dressing' One of the characteristics of thinkers who adopt this approach is that they tend to manifest considerable interest in any feature of human nature which could be deemed instinctual while simultaneously showing an almost complete disregard for the complexities of human behaviour and cultural history which are not susceptible to this kind of explanation. In this respect the more extreme proponents of genetic determinism resemble the navigator who decides to delete the land from his charts on the grounds that he is interested only in the ocean. Where the navigator goes wrong is in failing to recognise that the ocean is actually defined by land. Similarly the influence of genetic factors on human behaviour can be studied and assessed properly only by including a detailed and meticulous exploration of the role which is played by nurture. The main reason we can be confident that, however much our capacity for language is shaped by biological inheritance, there is no 'gene for German' (or for Japanese), is not because we have any knowledge of the particular genes which facilitate language. It is because we are intimately acquainted with the way in which people learn languages, and with the manner in which 'nurture' completely determines which particular languages individuals acquire. It follows that, paradoxically, the study of the role of 'nurture' - of the complex effects of child-rearing behaviour, education and social con- ditioning - is actually a precondition of understanding the role of 'nature' To engage in such a study is not in any sense to neglect the realm of biology. For what many thinkers have failed to recognise is that 'nurture', far from being opposed to 'nature', is itself a part of nature. It is itself a biological process with a rich and complex natural history of its own which has yet to be fully investigated. NOTES (PP. 458-61) Those thinkers who neglect to study the role of nurture sometimes attempt to justify their approach by characterising it as 'scientific. Yet the attempt to explain human nature by directing attention away from the observable details of human behaviour and towards invisible and largely inscrutable entities is Not the monopoly of modern genetic determinists. Something very similar was done for centuries by priests, prophets, theologians and other 'spiritual determinists' working within the mainstream of the Judaeo-Christian tra- dition. One of the reasons that sociobiology, like psychoanalysis before it, has found such an enthusiastic following in Puritan America is that it possesses many of the characteristics of the religious ideology which preceded it. It t00 frequently seeks to explain the visible by reference to the invisible. It too can be used to justify the economic, political or sexual status quo by appealing to unseen powers which supposedly control our destiny. Not only this but it also frequently provides what some have seen in religious faith - an excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Sociobiology, in all these respects at least, is perhaps best seen as one of the new spiritualisms of our age - a form of hard-centred mysticism which, like that created by Freud himself, has managed to reintroduce a traditional religious ideology in a disguised form, safe from the criticism of scientists (or some scientists at least) precisely because it is itself offered as a contribution to science. Although some forms of 'evolutionary psychology' may be more subtle than the socio- biology they derive from, others merely continue the same kind of biological reductionism under another name. For expositions of the tenets of sociobiology, see E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Harvard University Press, 1975 and David Barash, Socio- biology: The Whisperings Within, Souvenir Press, 1979. See also E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature, Harvard University Press, 1978. For a critique of sociobiol- ogy and genetic determinism which is, for the most part, much more subtle and valuable than the Marxism which frequently informs it, see Steven Rose, R. C. Lewontin and Leon J. Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature, Penguin, 1984. For the argument about language referred to above, see Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind, Penguin, 1994. For one example of dual allegiance to sociobiology and psychoanalysis, see Frank Sulloway's Freud: Biologist of Mind. For a recent attempt to marry Freud and Darwin which illustrates how meagre are the arguments of some 'evolutionary psychologists', see Christopher Badcock, Psycho Darwinism: The New Synthesis of Darwin and Freud, HarperCollins, 1994 2. Alex Comfort, Darwin and the Naked Lady: Discursive Essays on Biology and Art, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961, p. 8. 3- Gerald Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind, Penguin, 1992, p. xil. 4. Edelman, p. 145. S: Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (1949), Penguin, 1963. O. Patricia Churchland, for example, in her Neurophilarophy (MIT Press, 1080) has characterised the mind as essentially a kind of logic-machine thar operates an sentences'. These words are quoted by Raymond Tallis in his The Explicit dnimal: A Defence of Human Consciousness, Macmillan, 1991, P. 103. Tallis 612 NOTES (PP. 461-74) goes on to offer an extended critique of computational models of the mind in which he sees such models as defying logic while at the same time traducing 'the rich plenitude of experience' (p. 140). 7. Colin McGinn, "Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?', Mind, vol. XCVII, no. 891, July 1989. This essay is reprinted in McGinn's The Problem of Conscionsness, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991, pp. I-22. 8. W. M. O'Neill, The Beginnings of Modern Psychology, Penguin, 1968, p. 11. 9. Ryle, p. 301. 10. Ryle, Pp. 302-3. I. Wheeler, see above, Chapter 14, note 40. 12. Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, PF2, p. g0. 13. Charles Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Penguin, 1972, p. xxi. 14. Elisabeth Roadinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985, Free Association Books, 1990, P. 424. 15. Adam Kuper, Anthropologists and Anthropology: The British School 1922-72, Penguin, 1973, p. 206. 16. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, Penguin, 1969, pp. 140, 142. 17. Edmund Leach, Lévi-Strauss, Fontana, 1970, p. 42. 18. Stanley Diamond, 'The Myth of Structuralism' in Ino Rossi (ed.), The Uncon- scions in Culture: The Structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss in Perspective, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974, p. 315. See also Simon Clarke's The Foundations of Structuralism: A Critique of Lévi-Strauss and the Structuralist Movement, Har- vester Press/ Barnes and Noble, 1981. A view of Lévi-Strauss which is strikingly similar to the one I have taken here was offered recently by John Carey in a review of the paperback edition of Brian Vickers's Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels, Yale University Press, 1994. After praising Vickers's critique of modern criti- cal theory, Carey writes the following: In setting out theory's assumptions, (Vickers] reveals, inadvertently it seems, its resemblance to certain ancient ways of thought that may account for its residual appeal. Theory's preference for the immaterial over the things of this world, which it pronounces unreal, recalls the anti-materialist strain in Christianity and other religions. Lévi-Strauss, reducing all social systems to abstract models, located in the uncon- scious, sounds curiously like St Paul: 'In my mind, models are real, and I would say that they are the only reality… They do not correspond to the concrete reality of empirical observation. It is necessary, in order to reach the model which is the true reality, to transcend the concrete- appearing reality.' When St Paul talked like that, he had spiritual things in mind, not anthropological models. But the contempt for material fact and observation (shared by all the Paris intellectuals) is identical, and constitutes a sort of godforsaken Christianity (The Sunday Tines, 7 August 1994, Books, p. 3). NOTES (PP. 478-85) 613 CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE• THE BEHAVIOUR OF THE BODy 1. Gall, quoted in John M. O'Donnell, The Origins of Bebaviourism: American Paychology, 1870-1920, New York University Press, 1985, p. 70. 2. Hume, quoted in O'Donnell, p. 71 3. See O'Donnell, pp. 180-208; see also Gellner, pp. 13-17. 4. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (1949), Penguin, 1963, p. 302. Ryle observes that the general trend of his book'will undoubtedly, and harmlessly be stigma- tised as "behaviourist"" (p. 308). It seems to me, however, that Ryle's willing- ness to accept this characterisation actually misrepresents his own more nuanced position and that the stigma of behaviourism which has indeed been placed upon his arguments is very far from being as harmless as he suggests. Ryle himself certainly does not seek to deny the reality of what we frequently term "internal' sensations, thoughts or imaginings. He merely denies that these belong to a realm which is logically distinct from, and independent of, the 'external' realm of ordinary human behaviour: Certainly there are some things which I can find out about you only, or best, through being told of them by you. The oculist has to ask his client what letters he sees with his right and left eyes and how clearly he sees them; the doctor has to ask the sufferer where the pain is and what sort of a pain it is; and the psycho-analyst has to ask his patient about his dreams and daydreams. If you do not divulge the contents of your silent soliloquies and other imaginings, I have no sure way of finding out what you have been saying or picturing to yourself. But the sequence of your sensations and imaginings is not the sole field in which your wits and character are shown; perhaps only for lunatics is it more than a small corner of that field. I find out most of what I want to know about your capacities, interests, likes, dislikes, methods and convictions by observing how you conduct your overt doings, of which by far the most important are your sayings and writings. It is a subsidiary question how you conduct your imaginings, including your imagined monologues (p. 60). S. Quoted in Phyllis Grosskurth, Havelock Ellis: A Biography, New York Univer- sity Press, 1985, Introduction, p. xvi. 6. Nicholas Humphrey, "The Function of the Intellect', in P. P. G. Bateson and R. A. Hinde (ed.), Growing Points in Etbology, 1976. 7. Ryle, p. 28. 8. Ryle, p. Igoff. 9. Blackburn, quoted in Raymond Tallis, The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness, Macmillan, 199I, P. 9. 10. Colin McGinn, "Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?' (1989) in McGinn, The Problem of Consciousmess, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991, Pp. I-2. 11. Nicholas Humphrey, À History of the Mind, Chatto and Windus, 1992. 12. McGinn, London Review of Books, 1992, vol. 17. 13- Julian Dibbell, Voice Literary Supplement, 1992. 14. The metaphors of models, maps and charts which I use here in an attempt NOTES (PP. 485-92) 614 to describe the relationship of the brain to the rest of the body are clearly inadequate. In tort the Swiss neurologist, Carl von Monakow offered a much more complex image, itself no doubt inadequate, but a great deal more intri cate and suggestive: The connections between a local anatomical lesion (of the brain) and the residual functional disturbance (of the body, including speech, per- ception, movement etc.] are similar to that of a music box out of whose cylinder a locally circumscribed series of pegs has been taken (local defect) and the disturbance of the melody .. The error of tunes wil be, even by the most experienced person, deduced only with difficulty from the number and place of the lacking pegs (Von Monakow, 1911, quoted in Anne Harrington, Medicine, Mind and the Double Brain, Princeton University Press, 1987, P. 263). 15. Steven Rose, The Making of Memory: From Molecules to Mind, Bantam, 1993, p. 313. Although I write that Rose's research has run 'parallel' to the work of Edelman, these words should not be construed as implying either an iden- tity of scientific interests or complete agreement. In particular Rose is sceptical about the process of putative neuronal selection which Edelman calls 'neural Darwinism'. Although his phrase is catchy, I do not find it apt. Darwinian evolution is a process of preservation of favoured genotypes as a consequence of differential survival and reproduction of phenotypes. Neuronal ensembles do not survive and reproduce in this way - indeed they don't even replicate. Evolution and selection are poor metaphors to describe the processes of interaction, feedback, stabilization and growth of cells and synapses occurring during development - and indeed throughout an entire lifetime. What is to be welcomed, however, is Edelman's insistence on just that dynamic and developmental nature of biological processes which the computer analogy suppresses ... (p. 317). CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR• BEYOND PSYCHOANALYSIS 1. Bacon, Works, ed. Spedding, Ellis and Heath, London, 1857-9, IV, p. 60. 2. Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859), ed. J. W. Burrow, Penguin, 1968, p. 127. 3. Darwin, Pp. 139-42. 4. John and Elizabeth Newson, Seven Years Old in the Home Environment, Pen- guin, 1978, p. 13; Four Years Old in an Urban Community, Penguin, 1970, Pp- 25-6; Patterns of Infant Care in an Urban Community, Penguin, 1965, 5. One example of the immensely rich resources which are already available to theorists is provided by the work of the historian Norman Cohn on the role played by collective fantasies in European history. In three widely acclaimed books, The Pursuit of the Millennium, Warrant for Genocide, and Europe's Inner NOTES (PP. 492) 615 Demons, Professor Cohn has explored one of the most enduring of the irrational impulses which lie behind Judaeo-Christian history - 'the urge to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings imagined as agents of corruption and incarnations of evil'. In studying what are, in effect, some of the practical historical consequences of the Judaeo- Christian apocalyptic tradition, he has thrown more light on the history and dynamics of persecution and prejudice than perhaps any other historian either in Europe or America. It should be noted that, like many who have worked on the history of human irrationalism, Cohn has both invoked psychoanalyte theories, and implicitly endorsed their value - holding a view of history and psychoanalysis which bears some resemblance to that of E. R. Dodds (see below, note 15). Cohn's own richly empirical approach, however, overbrims this theoretical vessel and seems itself to call for a much more capacious and historically sensitive theoretical framework than psychoanalysis can provide. The major question raised by his work, but not answered satisfactorily, con- cerns the relationship between the supposedly "aberrant' or 'regressive' apoca- lypticism which he analyses to the orthodox apocalypticism of New Testament Christianity - or indeed of seventeenth-century Puritanism. In a quite different area of cultural history the extraordinary body of research which has been produced by Gershon Legman on obscene humour is one of the most useful and least celebrated of all recent scholarly achieve- ments. Legman's work shows how fruitful an ostensibly psychoanalytic approach can be in the hands of a natural investigator, whose impulse towards empiricism constantly enriches his impoverished conceptual framework and repeatedly confutes his own psychoanalytically inspired theoretical pro- nouncements. Whereas Legman has concentrated his attention on sexual humour, the realm of sexual fantasy has been reviewed in some detail by Nancy Friday. Friday has been criticised by some feminists, sometimes justifiably. Read critically, however, her work, like that of Legman, is an invaluable resource, and she frequently writes of both sexual behaviour and emotional relationships with great insight and perceptiveness. The single greatest problem with Friday's approach is her quasi-Freudian tendency to assume that the themes of sexual fantasy are somehow intrinsic to human sexuality. This approach goes hand in hand with her implied view that the most healthy response to all forms of fantasy is that of acceptance. At times this attitude of extreme libertarianism seems to lead to the implicit endorsement not only of fantasies which celebrate the sexual bodies of men and women but also of fantasies in which women (or men) are hurt, humiliated or degraded. In this respect Friday's work is perhaps best understood, for all its seeming emancipation from cultural taboos, as the expression of a particular kind of Puritanism. Behind her libertarianism and her reluctance to criticise sexual fantasies, we may discern something of the Puritan idealisation of the individual conscience, and the Puritan tendency to transfer the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy from the Bible-without to the 'Bible-within' of the indi- vidual human imagination. Friday herself is by no means completely in thrall to this kind of puritan 616 NOTES (P. 492) libertarianism, but it does colour her work with the result that she seems at times to enter into uncritical complicity with the misogynistic culture which is reflected in some of the fantasies she collects. Friday's work, broadly focused though it is, offers only one perspective on sexual fantasy. Since pornography itself is one of the major forms of sexual fantasy, any attempt to survey the entire realm of fantasy must consider the pornographic imagination in all its complexity. The literature on this subject is huge and some of the most illuminating perspectives have been offered by feminist critics. It is my own impression, however, that while feminist critics have rightly drawn attention to the role played by misogynistic fantasies in modern pornography, they have sometimes tended to understate the role played by such fantasies in Judaeo-Christian orthodoxy and in Western his- tory as a whole. At the same time, some feminist critics of pornography appear themselves to underestimate the extent to which modern attitudes towards pornography and to the portrayal of sexual intimacy continue to be shaped by Puritanism. They too are sometimes reluctant to discriminate between different aspects of the sexual imagination. The indiscriminate acceptance of sexual fantasies which characterises some extreme forms of libertarianism thus sometimes appears to be met with an indiscriminate rejection of all sexual themes which may be deemed pornographic. Among those most zealously opposed to pornography there appears to be very little appreciation of the extraordinary psychological and imaginative wealth which has been locked up in the realm of the obscene, or of the need to liberate this wealth. The battle now being fought over pornography in the United States, Britain and elsewhere is an extremely complex one in which there are many different positions. Yet it is difficult to avoid the impression that at the heart of this battle is a clash not between two radical alternatives, but between two different kinds of cultural puritanism, neither of which is in a position to deliver the liberation which both unfailingly promise. See Norman Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt, Paladin, 1976, p. xiv; The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Paladin, 1970; Warrant for Genocide: the Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Penguin, 1970. Gershon Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke, first series, London: Jonathan Cape, 1969; No Laughing Matter: Rationale of the Dirty Joke, second series, London: Granada Publishing, 1978. Nancy Fri- day, My Secret Garden: Women's Sexual Fantasies, Quartet, 1976; Men in Love, Men's Serual Fantasies: The Triumph of Love over Rage, Hutchinson, 1980; Women on Top, Hutchinson, 1991; My Mother/My Self, Fontana, 1986. Andrea workin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Women's Press, 1981; Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence, Women's Press, 1981; John Stoltenberg, Refusing to Be a Man, Fontana, 1990. On the association between Puritanism and libertarianism see my A Brief History of Blasphemy: Liberalism, Censorship and 'The Satanic Verses', The Orwell Press, 1990, pp. 19-67. See also my essay "The Body Politic and the Politics of the Body: The Religious Origins of Western Secularism' in John Keane (ed.), The Decline of Secularism? New Perspectives, in press. NOTES (PP. 495-7) 617 6. Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation;: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning, Routledge, 1992, p. 129. For those who are sympathetic to the view that the traditional dichotomy between reason and feeling is both artificial and damaging, perhaps the most encouraging sign is the appearance of a book written by a neurologist which contests the traditional division on the basis of clinical experience and the findings of modern neuroscience. In Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New York: G. P, Putnam's, 1994), Antonio R. Damasio recounts how he began writing his book in order 'to propose that reason may not be as pure as most of us think it is or wish it were, that emotions and feelings may not be intruders in the bastion of reason at all: they may be enmeshed in its networks, for worse and for better' (p. xi). His entire argu- ment is relevant to the point of view which I have put forward in the last part of this book. 7. Credit for this vivid and extremely useful way of characterising Western dualism should go to Ernest Gellner, who uses the term 'beast-angel dualism' in his The Psychoanalytic Movement, Paladin, 1985, p. II. 8. Alex Comfort, Darwin and the Naked Lady, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961, p. 8. 9. Comfort, p. 8. 10. A question which is frequently raised in response to the kind of arguments I put forward here is how rival theories of human nature can be 'rigorously tested'. The question is an interesting one in that it reflects the deep need felt by many of those working in the human sciences to conform to the criteria of knowledge which tend to be applied in the natural sciences - and above all in the physical sciences. One way of answering the question is to point out that, although some scientific hypotheses can be rigorously tested in laboratory conditions, many cannot. Hypotheses produced by physicists or chemists can generally be submitted to rigorous tests. Since most philosophies of science, including complex and interesting ones like that put forward by Karl Popper, tend to treat physics as a paradigm of scientific knowledge, testability has come to be widely viewed as an essential feature of any scientific hypothesis. But, as has been pointed out by many, if this criterion had been accepted and applied to Darwin's hypothesis of natural selection when it was first outlined in 1859, that theory would never have been regarded as a scien- tific hypothesis at all, since it was not the kind of theory which could be submitted to rigorous testing. Popper himself was aware of this, and, at first at least, declined to regard the theory of natural selection as a genuine scien- tific theory. The question of the intellectual differences between theories in the physi- cal sciences and theories in the biological sciences is a large one and cannot be treated adequately in a note. I would suggest here, however, that the reason why most modern biologists now regard the theory of natural selection as a Benuine scientific theory is not primarily because of the numerous experi- ments which have been performed with fruit-flies, interesting and valuable though these may be. It is because of the huge explanatory power which Darwin's theory possesses. In practice what evolutionary scientists have found 618 NOTES (PP. 497-8) is that the best way of 'testing' Darwin's theory has been to search out system- atically the most difficult, complex and 'miraculous' phenomena of the natural world and show how, contrary to the frequently expressed incredulity of modern creationists and anti-evolutionists, these can be explained in terms of the theory of natural selection. It is precisely this approach which is adopted with wonderful cogency by Richard Dawkins in his book The Blind Watch- maker. What his arguments demonstrate is that the explanatory power of the God-hypothesis is severely limited and can be used to account for the natural world only if we are prepared to tolerate repeated, theologically determined, leaps and lapses of reason. The explanatory power of the hypothesis of natural selection, however, is immense and has yet to be defeated by any significant problem posed by organic structures. If another theory were to be formulated which appeared to possess the same explanatory power as natural selection, when applied to the same range of problems, the status of Darwin's theory would be called into serious question. For the moment no such theory exists, or seems likely to be formulated, and the theory of natural selection is generally, and quite reasonably, regarded as a scientific theory even though it cannot be subjected to rigorous testing in a laboratory. In the case of evolution, it might be said, the almost infinite variety of living experiments which are part of the process of nature itself obviates the need for scientists to set up artificial experiments in laboratories. Nature is its own laboratory and the only experiments which can ultimately test the theory have already been underway for many millions of years. The primary task of the scientist is not to set up new experiments, but to observe the existing ones with scrupulous care, focusing minutely on any aspects of nature which appear to be at odds with the theory. Given the sheer scale and com- plexity of life on earth, no more extensive method of testing a theory could be conceived, and so far Darwin's theory, which was originally worked out on the basis of data drawn from thousands of the earth's 'natural laboratories', has passed all the tests. Any theory which seeks to extend Darwin's theory into the realm of human nature and human history must ultimately be tested in a similar way. Given the huge number of problems posed by human behaviour and human history, problems which current sociobiological theories do not even begin to deal with, there is likely to be no shortage of such tests. Because such tests are not experiments carried out in laboratory conditions there are some who will continue to insist that theories of human nature can never be 'scientific. This view, however, suggests more a scientistic outlook than a scientific one. For if science were to be restricted to investigat- ing that which can be tested in laboratories, then it would be an impoverished instrument indeed, and the intellectual wealth contained in Darwin's theories could not be counted part of it. Although these remarks do not provide a complete answer to the question about testing, they should perhaps help to make it clear that attempts to transter the epistemological criteria of the physical sciences to the life sciences, however rigorous-seeming they may be, are profoundly unscientific. I. Schrödinger, quoted by Bryan Appleyard, Understanding the Present, p. 208; for Appleyard's discussion, see pp. 208-10. NOTES (P. 498-500) 619 12. The original source for this quotation from an unidentified sociologist is the Bulletim of the American Association of University Professors (1948). My source for it is Telling the Truth about History by Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob (W. W. Norton, 1994, p. 16). They in turn cite Robert N. Proctor's use of the quotation in Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass., 1991, p. 176). 13. Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, Descartes' Dream; The World According to Mathematics, Penguin, 1990, Pp. 290-91. 14. Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League, Macdonald, 1971, p. 162. 15. L. C. Knights, Explorations, London, 1946, p. Ir. This passage is quoted by E. R. Dodds in a note appended to the last chapter of his The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), University of California Press, 1968, p. 269. In the same note Dodds writes that The late R. G. Collingwood held that 'irrational elements… the blind forces and activities in us, which are part of human life ... are not parts of the historical process.' This agrees with the practice of nearly all historians, past and present. My own conviction ... is that our chance of understanding the historical process depends very largely on removing this quite arbitrary restriction upon our notion of it. Dodds's judgements are frequently perceptive, as they are here, but it should be noted that, for all his interest in the irrational, he has a fundamentally rationalist outlook. For Dodds in 1949, which is when the lectures making up his book were originally delivered at Berkeley, psychoanalysis is understood as an instrument for understanding and controlling the 'irrational' so that the rational intellect may triumph at last and usher in the Open Society. So eloquently does Dodds, in the closing paragraphs of his book, picture psycho- analysis as the essential instrument of political and historical progress, and so closely does his view correspond with Freud's own prophetic, rational apocalypticism, that it seems worth reproducing those paragraphs here. In them Dodds draws a parallel between his own times and those of classical Greece, where a movement towards rationalism and science had recoiled, as Dodds sees it, into unreason and superstition. It should be noted that he refers to psychoanalysis only obliquely as an "instrument' but that the context makes it reasonably clear the instrument he has in mind is a specifically Freudian one: We too [like the Greeks] have experienced a great age of rationalism, marked by scientific advances beyond anything that earlier times had thought possible, and confronting mankind with the prospect of a society more open than any it has ever known. And in the last forty years we have also experienced something else - the unmistakable symp- toms of a recoil from that prospect. It would appear that, in the words used recently by André Malraux, 'Western civilisation has begun to doubt its own credentials.' What is the meaning of this recoil, this doubt? Is it the hesitation 620 NOTES (P. 500-2) before the jump, or the beginning of a panic Alight? I do not know. On such a matter a simple professor of Greek is in no position to offer an opinion. But he can do one thing. He can remind his readers that once before a civilised people rode to this jump - rode to it and refused it. And he can beg them to examine all the circumstances of that refusal. Was it the horse that refused, or the rider? That is really the crucial question. Personally, I believe it was the horse - in other words those irrational elements in human nature which govern without our know- ledge so much of our behaviour and so much of what we think is our thinking. And if I am right about this, I can see grounds for hope. As these chapters have, I trust, shown, the men who created the first European rationalism were never - until the Hellenistic Age - 'mere' rationalists: that is to say they were deeply and imaginatively aware of the power, the wonder and the peril of the Irrational. But they could describe what went on below the threshold of consciousness only in mythological or symbolic language; they had no instrument for under- standing it, still less for controlling it; and in the Hellenistic Age too many of them made the fatal mistake of thinking they could ignore it. Modern man, on the other hand, is beginning to acquire such an instrument. It is still very far from perfect, nor is it always skilfully handled; in many fields, including that of history, its possibilities and its limitations have still to be tested. Yet it seems to offer the hope that if we use it wisely we shall eventually understand our horse better; that, understanding him better, we shall be able by better training to overcome his fears; and that through the overcoming of fear horse and rider will one day take that decisive jump, and take it successfully (pp. 254-5). Few passages could illustrate more clearly the manner in which an essentially creationist and fundamentally superstitious form of dualism (beast-angel dualism being here replaced by horse-rider dualism) is presented by an intellectual as though it were the most reasonable thing in the world. Dodds's confidence that the rider (or angel) will triumph over the horse (or beast) is entirely orthodox. Given the argument already advanced in this book, it should not be the occasion of surprise that psychoanalysis is seen by Dodds as the intellectual means by which a rational heaven-on-earth is eventually to be brought about. It should perhaps also be noted that this kind of orthodox rationalist dream is also similar in some respects, though the similarity is not often remarked, to the sublime optimism of the apocalyptist John as he con- jured up his revelatory vision of the End in which the Beast, after being bound for a thousand years, is finally vanquished, and the Chosen reign with Christ and his angels for all eternity. 16. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, p. 1. 17. I borrow some of my terms here from Mary Midgley's stimulating discussion of what she calls 'The Unexpected Difficulties of Decide' (see Midgley, p. 92ff). NOTES (P. 506-11) 621 18. Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, Dent, 1988, p. 533 (and note). 19. It might well seem that to write in these terms is to tempt fate and to invite the response that the ship of discovery, as I have presented it here, is very far from being well caulked and that, in a number of respects, it remains intellectually unseaworthy. Such a response, however, far from constituting an objection to the project I have described, is exactly the kind of reaction on which its success depends. For, as Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob write in the last sentence of their recent book, "Telling the truth takes a collective effort' (Telling the Truth about History, p. 309). The preparations for any intellectual project of the kind I have described need to be wide- ranging indeed and that is why I have described this book merely as a 'contri- bution' to them. Fortunately many other contributions have already been made and I have tried to indicate, both in my text and in my notes, where some of the most helpful of these are to be found. Other contributions have yet to be made and if these do not contain searching criticism of all philo- sophies of science, including the one outlined in this chapter, little progress is likely to result. The ideals of critical debate and discussion which I endorse here are very similar to those which are held by most defenders of rationalism. It would be wrong to assume, however, that such ideals are always maintained consist- ently by those who most frequently appeal to them. Karl Popper has con- trasted the rationalist intellectual cultures of 'open societies' with the doctrinaire intellectual schools of 'closed societies'. In such schools, he observes, full debate of crucial doctrines is usually outlawed and 'in the main it is with assertion and dogma and condemnation rather than argument that the doctrine is defended' (Conjectures and Refutations, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972, p. I49). We should perhaps note, however, that neither liberals nor rationalists are immune to behaving in the same narrow doctrinaire way as Popper's 'schools', especially on those occasions when the doctrinal founda- tions of liberal individualism or of rationalism are themselves under attack. They themselves, in an attempt to defend an intellectually indefensible pos- ition, sometimes replace argument and reasoned criticism with dogma, con- demnation and abuse. (For one of the most perceptive commentaries on the manner in which intolerance sometimes undergirds doctrines of intellectual toleration, see John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, Penguin, Pp. 93-4.) 20. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, XXIlI. AFTERWORD • FREUD'S FALSE MEMORIES I. See Frederick Crews, 'The Revenge of the Repressed', New York Review of Books, 17 November 1994, pp. 54-60; 1 December 1994, Pp. 49-$8. See also the ensuing correspondence in issues up to 20 April 1995. These essays together with selections from published and unpublished correspondence, will form part of Frederick Crews's forthcoming book The Memory Wars: Freudian Science in Dispute, New York Review Imprints, 1995. The best treat- ment of the history of the recovered memory movement will be found in