Freud: An Unwilling Structuralist:

Reviewers of history endeavour to show that historical events are determined by factors that when exposed put the events in a better perspective and reveal new implicit aspects significance. I intend to do something of that sort with a brief account of the Freudian theory of psychoanalysis. Freud’s strive to get a comprehensive theory of psychoanalysis has never succeeded. The reason- surprisingly-is his genius.  He was looking for a functional theory, which would have been a theory of cause\effect format. This is the nature of theoretical formulations in Nomothetic sciences because dealing with the physical world permits confining observations within causative relations. Functional theories were the only perspective of scientific endeavours in Freud’s time. There was no clear concept of human sciences as a different set of sciences, or that their theories would be different from the causative format.

It was not until the thirties of last century when structuralism began to take shape and get identified. Human phenomena emerged (the first one in that regard was language) as a different type phenomenon that necessitated different type of theories. De Saussure- a linguist (1906)- made a distinction between speech and language in which language was the underlying structure of the varied speeches, thus set up the varied rules of each speech. The human sciences were born as distinct sciences. Thinkers realized that human phenomena were not amenable to simplistic cause\effect explanation, because they are formed of interconnected complex parts and aspects that require to be interpreted not explained. Marriage, for insurance, is a complex social phenomenon that exists in all human society but has varied and different essential rules. Yet, with all those variations it serves one purpose: encoding incestuous prohibitions.

Every time Freud seemed to have reached a functional explanation of a phenomenon (like dreams), his genius did not let him get away with it. His theory of wish fulfillment in dreams gave him the insight about the working of the primary processes in the formation of dreams, which led him to reveal the secrets of Parapraxes and Jokes (two subsequent works). So, the wish fulfillment discovery was pushed aside and the primary processes- or an unconscious processes- became what was behind the structuring of psychological phenomena (the unconscious that was stipulated in the three early books did not have a content like sex). Something more important transpired from that change in direction. The theory of psychopathology was at that point still based on sexuality as the cause of symptoms, which were the effect of repressing it.  The five years between the Interpretation of Dreams and The Book on Jokes were spend in revising the aetiological theory of sexuality. He came up with the theory of infantile sexuality, and repression of sexuality was no longer the cause of the neuroses. On the contrary, infantile sexuality reversed the causal relationship between sexuality and the neuroses: psychoneuroses were causes of sexual difficulties and their repression.

In the humanities, the functional theories collapsed in the face of the structural nature of psychical phenomena. Psychical phenomena, natural and pathological, were structures that could be interpreted as manifestations of other dynamics.  The notion of drives behind psychological phenomena was not anymore acceptable because the contribution of ‘something unconscious’ in creating psychic phenomena obviated the notion of a direct connection between drive and reaction.  At that point Freud’s genius made him revive a concept that has mentioned in the Three Essays: TRIEB.  He identified it as a pressure put on the mind to respond to endosomatic pressure. The concept of Trieb removed any trace or confusion about the psychoanalytic concept of human phenomena: they are not the responses specific internal or external stimuli (Instinkt), but a response to the pressure put on the mind by those stimuli to act. Therefor, it is not accurate or correct to think functionally about human phenomena because they are always a structure created in the mind before being actualized. Since no two minds are alike, even no response is like a previous one because the concept of Trieb eliminated functionalism from psychoanalysis. The human subject has to change the pressure of a stimulus into a wish before responding to it.

Freeing himself from the narrow concepts of functionality and causality, Freud was able to reveal that psychical phenomena are made of dualities (sexual Trieb vs. ego Trieb, life and death, etc.). Without articulating this foundational insight or the contribution of any other known external input,  Freud wrote three papers (1915) called -wrongly-by Strachey “the metapsychological papers”. The three papers were on Repression, Trieb, and the Unconscious. He stipulated that our psychological life is structured as dualities and not entities. Repression is not a defence mechanism but two processes one deals with the preverbal and the other with the post verbal issues. He also added that unconsciousness is three states of dualities. The most important of those dualities is the duality of pre consciousness and unconsciousness, which is a systemic state in our thought processes and the function of the primary process.

In his search for the ultimate functional theory his genius made him discover several structural formulations of the psyche, which he called “metapsychologies”. Freud’s metapsychologies allowed talking about psychical processes and structures in qualitative and quantitative terms without turning those reprocess into entities. He said that if you could talk about a process from an economical, dynamic, and topographic terms then you are talking about it metpsychologically. In other terms: Freud (the closet structuralist) was aware that metapsychology could be distorted to become other functional theories.

The good example is his latest metapsychology of the tripartite agencies of ego id and superego. Once he established this tripartite model of the psyche, he immediately attached to it the first metapsychology of the conscious\ unconscious, and preconscious. Thus, it was not possible to use the agencies as entities because they differ based on their topographic state of functioning. Nevertheless, we still find   Hartmann and Rapaport ignore Freud explicit warning and build an ego psychology that had a detrimental and lasting effect on psychoanalysis, more so in the USA.

The result of misunderstanding, ignoring, or just the mirage of a functional theory of psychoanalysis has resulted in the kind of distortions that created its modern crisis. Exploring this point further would be a good way of ending this long posting. Therefore, I stop here and plan to visit the catastrophic theoretical condition of psychoanalysis. 

I have to emphasize that my views are product of the American field of psychoanalysis more than its condition in other parts of the world due to my limited contacts out of North America.