[The current
New Yorker features a clear-eyed, deft, though not really probing
appreciation of the celebrated English
psychoanalyst
Adam Phillips, by
the reliable Joan Acocella.
Phillips
is a sort of Freudian quasi-demi-acolyte-paravail;
in recognition of which, we repost this (updated) essay.]
A word, first, on the audacity of coupling the names of
Freud and Chomsky, albeit only in the specific dimension of their relation to
acolytes. Both were/are
charismatic men, having attracted brilliant and fervid followers; but if that were all there was to it,
it would be intellectually shallow to group them into a sort of two-person
granfalloon. After all, any
two-bit swami or Hollywood celeb
has fervent fans, with attendent defections (stalkers) and
what-have-you; their names do not
deserve to be in any way yoked with these.
On the personal level, Freud and Chomsky have in common
extraordinary intelligence, along with
extraordinary intellectual bravado.
At the level of theory, both champion something many others find hard to
take, and which is built around a core notion of
(1) a mental primordium, which
(2) is crucially, critically,
and mysteriously influenced during your very early years, and which then subsides, and is
relatively inflexible thereafter.
(Note: A slightly less audacious coupling, this of Freud and Holmes, may be consulted here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/02/freud-and-holmes-updated.html )
(Our essay may be considered in the spirit of Plutarch's
Parallel Lives.)
Consider this heartfelt account, from an orthodox Freudian:
Konrad Lorenz noticed that, if you
walk in front of a little chick at
a certain time in the chick’s life, he’ll follow you, and if you do it at other
times he won't; there’s a particular time when he gets
‘set’. And we have found out in
psychoanalysis that in human development, too, there is a time that is uniquely
formative… The Oedipal period -- roughly three-and-a-half to six years -- is
like Lorenz standing in front of the chick .. the source of all subsequent
adult behaviors. If you take a
person’s adult life -- his love, his work, his hobbies, his ambitions -- they all point back to the Oedipus complex.
-- (quoted in) Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession
(1981), p. 158
And:
The prolonged biological
helplessness of the human infant
and the contingent vicissitudes of the child-parent relationship remain of decisive and demonstrable
significance in all optative
aspects of human psychology.
-- Leo Stone, The Psychoanalytic
Situation (1961), p. 107
(Much in my essays is satirical; but here let me
drop all humor whatever, and
urgently plead: Mothers, nurse your babies! Infant formula delenda est!!)
~
Freud was acutely aware of the danger that anti-Semitism …
could result in … suppression of psychoanalysis, and he hoped that the adherence of a Swiss Christian of
Jung’s stature could help rescue
his movement from this fate. …
Freud needed a ‘son’ no less than
Jung needed a ‘father’, but the kind of son Freud wanted was one who would be willing to defer
unconditionally to his authority …
-- Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very
Short Introduction (1994), pp. 20-21
Thus far, the potential conflict -- the set mouse-trap -- is
merely generic, without intellectual specificity or interest. But now we come to the nub, or at least to some substance:
As time passed, Jung’s differences
with Freud became harder to
conceal. Two of Freud’s basic
assumptions were unacceptable to him:
(1) that human motivation is
exclusively sexual, and
(2) that the unconscious mind is
entirely personal and peculiar to the individual.
… Jung believed there lay a deeper
layer … the collective unconscious…
a dynamic substratum, common to all humanity, on the basis of which each individual builds his or her private experience of
life.
-- Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very
Short Introduction (1994), p. 22
Now the rift has bite!
But -- a bite beyond the obvious. For, in general, there are several parallels between the two
great secular Jewish scientific-humanistic innovators, Freud and Chomsky. But in the specifics of this instance,
it is actually Jung, the
apostate-to-be, the renegade from Freudianism, who holds a doctrine -- the
collective unconscious (cf. and ctr. the “group mind”) inevitably reminiscent of
Chomsky’s central doctrine -- far more central than linguists realized at first
-- of an innate and universal
Language Acquisition Device: one
determinative of each person’s contingent linguistic development, yet not available to direct introspection.
Jung maintained that the incest
taboo was primary: it existed a
priori, and was not derived from the father’s prohibition of the boy’s lust for
his mother.
-- Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very
Short Introduction (1994), p. 23
Here Jung is surely right; and here Chomsky
is surely right, when he insists that the basic lines of individual language-acquisition are not dependent in detail upon parental or tutorial correction or specific
instruction.
* * *
~ Commercial break ~
We now return you to
your regularly scheduled essay.
* * *
Okay, back to the soap-opera:
Freud admonished him: “My inclination is to treat those colleagues who offer
resistance [to Freud’s ideas]
exactly as we would treat patients in the same situation.” Jung was irked by such condescension..
-- Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very Short Introduction
(1994), p. 22
Actually I
would tend to defend Freud here.
Unconsciously to treat recalcitrant colleagues like wayward patients
(those who refuse to take their meds, for instance) is -- well if you wish, condescending, but
actually worse than that.
Yet, consciously to adopt -- as a behavioral hypothesis, defeasible in the event -- such an analytic stance,
lifts us to a quite different and
little-frequented realm.
The explicit rift, Stevens informs us, came in 1912, with
the publication of Wandlungen und Symbole
der Libido; he quotes a
pertly-worded challenge from the younger man to the elder:
“It is a risky business for an egg to be cleverer than the
hen,” Jung wrote to Freud. “Still, what is in the egg must find the courage to creep out.”
-- Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very
Short Introduction (1994), p. 23
This is delicious.
*
Für psychologisch
tiefgreifende Krimis,
in pikanter
amerikanischer Mundart,
und christlich gesinnt,
klicken Sie bitte hier:
*
At work, I am perforce required (being after all on the
brink of retirement, or else death) to consider the matter of my
successor: Not in any grand sense,
but simply, someone to do the job I do, more or less as I do it, which is (as
cryptolinguists come to learn) more difficult than it looks. And if someone were to send me a sassy
e-mail along those lines, I would be delighted. Indeed, I would feel free to retire the next day, knowing
that the task was in good hands.
Freud, however, didn’t take it so well.
-- And indeed, rather than expatiate further
on this well-known episode of
psycho-socio-intellectual history (anent which
I have no special knowledge or insight at all
-- consult any source :-- Ernest Jones,
or even
this), it would be well, were I to comment instead, however
briefly, upon a matter I know first-hand:
Der Fall Jakov Malkiel.
Professor Yakov Malkiel was the doyen of Romance Philology in America. Or rather, in time, he became the doyen of Romance Philology
tout court, a shining example of how
the Bolsheviks and later the Nazis
did America a great favor
by sending us some of their best.
Malkiel reached us in two steps: first his bourgeous Jewish family fled
the Bolshies, only to land in Berlin, where Malkiel earned his doctorate during
the, umm, ‘thirties … Thence he
fled to America, initially winding up, with spectacular inappropriateness, in
Cowboy Country. I believe I may
have documented all this in an appreciation, based on some tapes I made of
interviews with him, published (probably) by the Berkeley Linguistics Society,
although I’m uncertain whether it ever actually appeared. Y.M. specifically forbade a
Festschrift.
Anyhow -- while I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley,
Malkiel was, not quite my
Doktorvater,
but one of three who might claim that title, the others being Prof. Charles
Fillmore and Prof. Ariel Bloch.
In
actuality, none of them really guided my dissertation in the least -- I went
very much my own way (so much so, that it helped to foreclose a career, in a
field where it does help to belong to a recognized coterie), as you can
easily verify
here -- but each was, in his own unique way, an
inspiration: not so much for the doctoral thesis (Otto Jespersen and -- sic --
Rebecca West, were more determinative here) as for mind in general, and thus
life in general.
Once safely out of sagebrush country, YM (as we shall call
him, after the pattern of his acolytes) settled-in well in Berkeley. In his chosen field of Romance
Philology, he truly put it on the map, founding and editing a revered journal
of that title. And among the contributors was a young
Spanish professor, of inclinations more philological than literary, who was
reportedly (this was before my time there) by way of being considered something
of a protégé, named Jerry Craddock.
Things hummed along, until, one day …..
Now, the following incident is something I know only by
hearsay (and thus, possibly mis-know).
But the way I heard it,
young Craddock published an article which differed from his senior, Professor
Malkiel: and this, in a way, or on
a tone, that the latter considered snide.
Great was the consternation on Olympus, as the gods chose
sides.
Into the office of the hapless Craddock stormed Dan Yakov, a Man of Wrath. Flinging the offending article onto the
cringing Craddock’s desk, he cried -- one word:
“MAAAAAA-GIS-TRI-CIIIDE
!!!!!!”
Magistricide
! A word that resonates like
swords on Roman cobble-stones --
Magistricide
! An arrow, fledged and
fleshed --
Magistricide ! a j’accuse javelin, flung
straight into that black thing
the paynim calls his heart …
Thereafter YM had no acolyte-in-chief or heir-apparent -- he
and Craddock never did make up. He did have numerous Malkielitas, as they were called -- comely and industrious young women
who came and went, doing good work for a time, and never threatening his
patriarchal supremacy.
As for Craddock -- He should obviously have left that
campus, yet he hung around, hanging on, a figure of pity (of the cross-oneself
kind), like Mario Savio, the former free-speech firebrand, who likewise never
left Berkeley, but dragged out his life in trembling semi-obscurity, as a warning to the
young.
~
YM’s kiboshing of the Festschrift always struck me as one of his less
creditable actions. But perhaps
those who have been around the block (or around the bend) may better instruct us.
Thus, Sigmund Freud, long a prophet without honor in his own
country (or indeed, city), jibbed
at the prospect of effusive (albeit belated) gushings upon occasion of his
seventieth birthday:
Previous birthday celebrations had been bad enough, but this was bound to be worse. At one moment he considered escaping by immuring himself in a sanatorium
for a week, but concluded that would be too cowardly and too unkind to his
well-wishers.
-- Ernest Jones, Freud: The Last
Phase (1957), p. 122
Even so, upon plea of a heart ailment, “I have managed to
suppress a Special Number of the Wiener Medizinische Zeitschrift which was being planned".
Likewise on the occasion of his eightieth, when he quashed the proposal for a Gedenkbuch or Sammelband.
Such qualms have their hidden wellsprings, and are hard to
interpret. But in 1936 (op. cit.,
p. 208) Freud learned of a proposed biography by the distinguished
German-Jewish writer Arnold Zweig, with whom he had thitherto enjoyed good
relations, yet responded with an obscurantist, a near-delirious diatribe, which
has some diagnostic value:
Whoever undertakes to write a
biography binds himself to lying,
to concealment, to hypocrisy, to flummery
and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, since biographical
material is not to be had [sic], and if it were, it could not be used [sic,
sic]. Truth is not accessible;
mankind does not deserve it.
And wasn’t Prince Hamlet right
when he asked, who would escape a whipping, if he had his deserts?
These effusions are reported by Freud’s admiring…
biographer, Ernest Jones.
And they point towards our old enemy, the Narcissistic Wound.
Honors that arrive late, in the
twilight of life, cannot poultice that wound, of which they serve as a
reminder.
[Update]
And now this, expressed with characteristic vinegar-and-salt by an
Oxford outsider-philosopher:
And if there are any who think my
work good, let them show their approval of it by attention to their own. So, perhaps, I
may escape otherwise than by
death the last humiliation of an aged scholar, when his juniors conspire to print a volume of essays and offer it to him as a sign that they now consider him
senile.
-- R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (1939)
~
There is a another parallel between Malkiel-Craddock and
Freud-Jung. The latter pair, ex
professio, engaged in a specific hazardous activity for a fraught relationship
-- interpreting each other’s dreams.
Do not try this with your spouse or fiancée!
Of all the dreams they analyzed,
two were to be critical for their friendship. The first was one of Freud’s, which Jung did his best to
interpret on the basis of only a few associations from Freud. When Jung pressed him for more, Freud
looked rather suspiciously at him, and declined: “I cannot resk my authority,” he said. At that moment, commented Jung, he lost
it altogether.
-- Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very
Short Introduction (1994)
(Of course, this is only Jung’s account.)
The other was a dream of Jung, which, Freud swiftly decided,
denoted … magistricide, a death-wish
against himself from his designated heir.
* * *
~ Commercial break ~
Relief for
beleaguered Nook lovers!
We now return you to
your regularly scheduled essay.
* * *
~ ~ ~
Freud broke
not
only with his would-be-heir-apparent Jung, but with his important -- his
crucial -- early collaborator, Wilhelm Fliess;
broke bitterly.
Nay more:
A similar fate overtook Freud’s
relationship with Breuer, Adler, Stekel, Meynert, Silberer, Tausk, and Wilhelm
Reich. Reich developed a
psychosis, from which he recovered only temporarily, while Siberer and
Tausk eventually committed suicide. For Jung, the consequences were almost
as dire.
-- Anthony Stevens, Jung: A Very
Short Introduction (1994), p. 25
What we have here
is not the tragedy of Oedipus, but
what we may call a Cronus Complex
-- after the god that ate his young, lest they in their turn slay him, who had slain his sire. Eventually he
was overthrown by Zeus, his own son.
.jpg) |
| Saturno devorando a su hijo -- Goya |
[Update 12 Nov 2012:
The level of reader interest does not warrant our developing
the parallels with Chomsky and his school (or rather: schools). In any case, the tale has already been
exceedingly well told by Randy Harris in The Linguistics Wars
(1993).
So, back to Freud.]
~
Was für Krimi liest
wohl Dr. Sigmund Freud?
Schauen Sie mal!
~
Despite his conscious best efforts, Freud himself left no
designated successor; his first
choice for that mantle, Jung, wound up a schismatic. Though an excellent analyst in her own right, it
was largely owing to the default of consanguinity that his daughter Anna (née Freud, morte Freud; she never
married) served as, not so much the reigning caliph, as a successor-placeholder.
Complicating matters further
was a shift of the geographical center of mass for
psychoanalysis, from Mitteleuropa to the Western Hemisphere.
This was a result
partly of the fractiousness of those
prickly central-Europeans, which manifested itself very early in the movement
and got worse and worse;
partly from the upheaval of the two
World Wars, which spewed so much irreplaceable Kulturgut across the Atlantic
and onto our shores;
and partly to
a factor which I am unable to evaluate:
Why did the New World (which Freud himself looked down on -- he once
remarked that the only good thing to have come of “Columbus’s crime” was the
discovery of tobacco) prove such fertile ground for the Freudian spores?
For that, you would have to
stretch out the Americas themselves upon the couch.
The fact is, North America provided early and crucial
support -- yet not initially from the centers you might imagine (New York,
Boston), but rather from Worcester, Massachusetts (a place-name that has not
much thriven since, and which may send some of you to your gazetteers) and from
Canada, where Ernest Jones (his later meticulous biographer-hagiographer) had
taken refuge from British hostility and neglect.
And in later days, the per-capita center-of-mass of
orthodox Freudianism
has wound up
being …
Argentina.
~
With the passing generations, we come to the new and more
vexing problem of acolytes of acolytes
-- acolytes paravail.
The clearest illustration of this is in Islam. The Prophet Muhammad (upon whom be
peace) died without designating a successor. Now, the Arabic word for ‘successor’ is khalifah, and it is under this designation that successive figures
at the head of the empire-wide Muslim ummah were known, capriciously anglicized as caliph.
The first caliph, Abu-Bakr, was an uncontroversial and
rather colorless figure, who did not reign long. Then two more -- and then a truly charismatic successor,
Ali, eventually evinced by the upstart Yazid.
At this point the history of Muslimdom splits, according as
whether you accept, as a pragmatist, the legitimacy of that succession -- those
who do are known as Sunni -- or
reject it in favor of a mystical investment of the person of Ali: these are the Shia.
Things then trundle along for a time, history ticking over,
until another conflict arose among the latter group of schismatics, so that now
the world enjoys the choice between Twelver
Shiites and the more exigent Seveners.
Well. All this
by way of allowing the world-historical searchlight briefly to sweep the skies, before again alighting upon that
doughty, ragged band of psychoanalysts.
Of the many post-Freudian schools that developed, typically
named after one or another… not so much caliph
as anti-pope … the Jungian school, the Adlerian, the
Reichian, the Kohutian, or the followers of Karen Horney or Harry Stack Sullivan -- we shall say nothing. But rather turn our gaze back to the
tried-and-true sunnis of Freudianism, those who soldiered on in the master’s
shadow, spurning the howls of the apostates. And this, simply because it has been so brilliantly
chronicled by Janet Malcolm, in her series of New Yorker articles, “In
the Freud Archives”, later reprinted as a book.
This intrepid journalist had the good fortune to come across
a truly colorful character -- a sometimes professor of Sanskrit who somehow managed to
swashbuckle his way into the tight closed circle -- the sphincter, in fact --
of orthodox Freudians, and be handed the keys to the crown jewels, the
jealously guarded Freud Archives; by name,
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
(Some of our own pilferings from this treasure-trove
can be inspected
here.)
From a literary standpoint, he is a
memorable character:
He enters the
scene like the magnificent Psmith …
and exits it ignominiously like Ukridge.
One would not have imagined that so unlikely a character
could have a sosie simultaneously on
the world stage, but indeed he did:
one Peter Swales, an odder bird, with a background, not in Sanskrit (beileibe nicht), but with the Rolling Stones, and otherwise
entirely self-taught.
I originally read the article back in 1983, as it appeared in
the magazine; and was disappointed
that, issued in book form over a decade later, it had not been updated or
expanded, save for one brief chastened and chastening afterword. The fact is, after what was
really a quite sympathetic portrait
given his various behaviors, Masson turned around and sued her, and the
suit dragged on -- slithered on like a serpent -- for many years before being
finally dismissed. Understandably,
Ms. Malcolm no longer has any appetite for going back to touch the subject.
Compare Newton, principally re his troubles with Hooke:
Philosophy is such an impertinently
litigious Lady, that a man had as good be engaged in lawsuits, as have to do
with her.
-- Newman, ed. World of
Mathematics (1956), p. 265
I’ll not attempt to summarize her book, since it is short
enough as it is, and every line is golden.
It is supplemented by the author’s other brief but brilliant
gem, Psychoanalysis: the
Impossible Profession, likewise originally an article in The New Yorker. It might seem that In the
Freud Archives virtually wrote itself, since she had the good fortune to
stumble upon a couple of quite colorful and voluble characters. But in this more theoretically,
less anecdotally focused work, her own contribution is paramount, in both
insight and wit. As:
Hartvig Dahl is the New York
Psychoanalytic Institute’s grudging concession to the claims of “pure
research”;
he is a sort of
shabbas goy to the orthodox membership.
-- Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession
(1981), p. 84
She also manages to bring Chomsky in to the mix -- not in an
enlightening way, but we quote, since Chomsky has been rather l’Arlésienne of
this piece. Describing the
intensive study of a taped analytic session by Dahl and his sidekick, a
linguistics Ph.D.:
The tool for the unmasking of these
covert communications was Noam
Chomsky’s transformational-generative grammar, in which Virginia Teller was
well versed.
-- Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession
(1981), p. 84
Umm… no.
Detailed and probing
rhetorical and semantic analysis of a text can
indeed be fruitful (das weiss ich selbst sogar beruflich), but it has no more
to do with TG than with quantum mechanics.
~
Freud’s biographer, and one of the most faithful acolytes of
all, writes:
In 1914, Freud made one of his radical revisions of his views on the
structure of the mind, in an important essay entitled “On Narcissism: An Introduction”.
It caused some bewilderment among his adherents, until we were able to
assimilate its numerous implications.
-- Ernest Jones, Freud: Years of
Maturity (1955), p. 302
Jones, speaking as one who had faithfully followed the party
line, found this new swerve “disturbing”.
One is immediately reminded of the scene in generative
linguistics, from the publication of Chomsky’s “Remarks on Nominalization” on: repeatedly pulling the rug out from under the feet of his followers.
~
For an enigma of Dr.
Freud,
wrapped in a mystery
of Sherlock Holmes,
try this:
~
So: does Freud
fit the picture (as his detractors have claimed, and his defenders denied) of Saturno devorando a sus hijos?
That Freud should repeatedly have felt the need to proclaim
that (paraphrasing) “you all have a right to think as you please, and go your
own way, without offending me”,
has a flavor (at best) of “He doth protest too much” (and, at worst, of certain beguiling invitations of Stalin). But a rather
more circumstantial perspective is quoted (in translation) by his sympathetic
biographer:
“There is another consideration …
which makes me specially unfitted for the function of a despotic censor … I do
not find it easy to feel my way into alien modes of thought, and I have as a rule to wait until I
have found some connection with my meandering ways. So if you wanted to wait with every new idea until I can
endorse it, you would run the risk of getting pretty old.
-- Ernest Jones, Freud: The Last
Phase (1957), p. 60
That is wise, and rings true. Whether Freud was always able to draw on such wisdom, is
another matter.
* * *
~ Commercial break ~
We now return you to
your regularly scheduled essay.
* * *
Whoever was raised upon Marx, or Freud, or Chomsky, and who
writes in their wake, is forever looking over his shoulder. But occasionally -- as indeed
with those masters, who after all had, for a time, masters of their own --
there is a clean break with the past, and no looking back. Thus, rather plaintively, two prominent
but non- or indeed extra-Chomskyan American linguists:
Such comment suggests that the
recent history of the field can be
described by comparing a known Chomsky
with the inferred content of a
Tomb of the Unknown Bloomfieldian.
-- D. Hymes & J. Fought, American
Structuralism (1975), p. 127
Weiteres zum Thema/Related posts:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/12/acrimony-among-acolytes.html
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-agony-and-acolyte_28.htm
[Update May 2014]
The co-presence of the names
Freud
or
Chomsky in the title of this
essay, is largely accidental.
I happened
to have been reading a fair amount about the history of the psychoanalytic movement,
with its repeated scissions and loyalty-wars, and was reminded of similar
events among those schooled by the Chomsky movement, several of whom I knew
personally.
But I intended no
substantive comparison between the actual standing or intellectual systems of
these two giants of mind.
Yet (in
another book, that happens to lie upon my night-table), the philosopher and
sociologist
Ernest Gellner does
explicitly bring these names into apposition, in the course of his rather
abstract meditation -- philosophical and sociological, more than really depth-psychological
-- upon the history of Freudianism as an intellectual and social
phenomenon.
Gellner counts himself
among the admirers of the Cantabridgian linguist, and the detractors of the
Viennese physician, whom he compares thus:
The point which Chomsky made in his
celebrated critique of behaviourism -- that the stimulus-response model, when
applied to linguistic competence, works only if one retrospectively invents the
stimuli required to account for the given response -- applies with at least as
great a force to this aspect of
Freudianism.
-- Ernest Gellner, The Psychoanalytic
Movement (1985; 2nd edn. 1993), p. 107
[Update] The
converse of an acolyte is an
intellectual ancestor. Here a historian, and admirer of Freud,
notices an anomaly:
One of the difficulties in placing
Freud precisely within the community of scientists stems from his unmatched eminence as a founder. No
other innovator -- not Copernicus or Galileo, not Newton or Darwin or
Einstein -- had so few direct ancestors.
-- Peter Gay, The Freud Reader
(1989), p. xx
[Update 11 juin 2014] How sharper than a serpent's tooth ...
An update to the incident reported
here:
Le président d'honneur du FN, qui
multiplie les piques à l'encontre de sa fille
Jean-Marie Le Pen se vengera-t-il
du parricide politique dont il se dit «victime» après ses propos invitant à
«une fournée» d'artistes? Interrogé par Le Scan, le président d'honneur du
Front national assure qu'il «prendra ses responsabilités et donnera ses
instructions» lors du prochain congrès du parti.
[Misc]
Concerning the strained relations between two premier Dutch
historians:
How can we account for Jan Romein’s
continued view of Huizinga as his imperfect but revered mentor? … Is this not a
nearly classical oedipal relationship?
The intellectual son slays
his revered intellectual father -- his Doctorvater
….
-- Harry Marks, introduction to Jan
Romein, The Watershed of Two Eras:
Europe in 1900 (1967, Eng. transl. 1978), p. xxiv
For a portrait of the acolyte situation of Wittgenstein and the Wiener Kreis, try this:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2025/11/elective-acolytes.html
