Purity and Danger

(As often, this essay-title  is double-edged.  In the first instance, it echoes that of a very good work of depth-psychological anthropology, by Mary Douglas.  And to our present topic, it alludes to the rigor -- the abstinence -- the “purity” of the orthodox Freudian stance towards the patient, and to the alleged “danger” of the psychoanalytic method.)

Earlier, in an offhand review of a mediocre film, “ADangerous Method”,  we scoffed at the implicit assertion in the title (never developed), contrasting the alternatives of either letting the mental abnormality fester, or ‘treating’ it with things like castration (for homosexuality, pedophilia, or adultery with the sheriff’s wife), clitoridectomy (for hysteria), electric torture (for shell-shocked soldiers, to encourage them to return to the front -- Freud himself testified against this in a postwar hearing about the Austro-Hungarian army, and was vilified [Jones III 23]), ECT/ insulin shock (good for what ails ya), etc.  But now, having re-read an article by Janet Malcolm (who is not given to crying wolf), I shall give that caveat a hearing:

Behind the apparent “innocence” of Freud’s sexual wishes toward Dora  lies a profound and skeptical knowledge of himself  and of his motives, and of the danger of his creation.  He knew he was playing with fire, but he had the Promethean audacity to persist in his dangerous game of therapy.

-- Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis:  The Impossible Profession (1981), p. 101

The New York Freudian analyst who is the central informant of that book, is given to positing an analogy between psychoanalysis and surgery (an analogy first emphasized by Freud, in fact).  She asks, wherein lies the justification;  and he replies:

“Because it’s so radical.  Because it indicates how impersonal and intimate  analysis is.  Because it tells you that it is not a casual procedure, that it is serious and dangerous, that it is dire. …

“Our science isn’t harmless.  We psychoanalysts  play with fire every day, with the possibility of getting burned  and of burning someone else.”

-- Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis:  The Impossible Profession (1981), p. 160-2

Indeed, he goes on to make what is implicitly an argument in the “Problem of Lay Analysis”, in favor of the orthodox New York requirement that candidates for their profession profess an M.D. :  the “endless time spent in the operating room holding retractors”  steels you for the psychic probing you must later unsentimentally carry out.