SIGMUND FREUD: 1856-1956
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imagined the extent to which it would be done in
his
name, in books
worshipfully acknowledging his teaching or fulsomely dedicated to
his memory. Paradoxically, with the aim of making psychoanalysis
more scientific, the neo-Freudians have made it less so: where Freud
was descriptive, they are hortatory; where he was the humble thera–
pist, they are faith-healers, inspirational preachers, be-glad-you're–
neurotic Pollyannas.
The question of whether in fact Horney, Fromm, and Sullivan
are Freudians or psychoanalysts at all seems to me of relatively minor
importance, and is probably impossible to answer authoritatively any–
way. In
The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement
in 1914, Freud
reserved the right, as its founder, to say what was and what was
not psychoanalysis, but his various statements of the criteria involved
shift disconcertingly. In the
History,
he calls the theory of "repres–
sion" in the unconscious the pillar on which the edifice rests, "really
the most essential part of it," along with the empiric facts of "trans–
ference" and "resistance." "Every investigation which recognizes
these two facts and makes them the starting-point of its work may
call itself psychoanalysis," he writes, "even if it leads to other results
than my own." Later in the book he describes the dream as "the
shibboleth of psychoanalysis," and a few pages later declares that
Jung's approach "no longer has the slightest claim to call itself psy–
choanalysis," apparently because it discards the sexual nature of the
libido and the reality of the Oedipus complex. In other works, Freud
makes the infantile sexual etiology of the neuroses the test of psy–
choanalysis, or remarks "a psychoanalytic, that is, genetic explana–
tion."
If
any investigation starting from the mechanisms of the uncon–
scious may call itself psychoanalysis, the theories of Horney, Fromm,
and Sullivan are probably psychoanalytic. They certainly recognize
the existence of resistance and repression, and Horney even calls the
concept of resistance "of paramount value for therapy." On the
genesis of the neuroses from infantile sexuality, they are considerably
less orthodox, since they recognize early sex frustrations as causative
in some cases but insist that factors like "anxiety" or "the current
life-situation" are more relevant. They use the term "transference,"
but mean not a repetition of an infantile attachment, Freud's "cure
through love," but, with Sullivan, a significant new sort of inter-
