92
PARTISAN REVIEW
Psychoanalysis can stand serious modification in freeing it from
the biological sciences and adjusting it to developments in other cultural
sciences. Unfortunately, Dr. Bettelheim does not stop there. His major
disagreement with Freudian psychology is in areas of philosophic depth
and profundity where it is least in need of revision and has suffered
from it most.
If
Freud's aim was laboriously to reclaim some cropland
of ego from the swamps of id, Bettelheim's policy is ignore id, let us
have "ego psychology." Psychoanalysis, he says, is wrong to view "social
institutions as mainly resulting from or expressive of man's destructive
or irrational instinctual tendencies"; perhaps this was inevitable in those
old fellows, fighting "entrenched denial and repression," but now with
ego psychology we emphasize "positive human emotions and motiva–
tions."
For many of us, the answer to this was given by Freud himself in
The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement,
in response to the first
of the "ego" psychologies, Alfred Adler's splintering in 1910. Freud
writes in Brill's translation:
Psychoanalysis has a greater interest in showing that all ego stnvmgs
are mixed with libidinal components. Adler's theory emphasizes the
counterpart to it; namely, that all libidinal feeling contains an admixture
of egotism. This would have been a palpable gain if Adler had not made
use of this assertion to deny, every time, the libidinal feelings in favor
of the impelling ego components. His theory thus does exactly what all
patients do, and what our conscious thinking always does; it rationalizes,
as Jones would say, in order to conceal the unconscious motives.
Freud's conclusion is flatly that Adler's psychology "signifies an aban–
donment of analysis and a secession from it," and it would appear to
this writer that Bettelheim's psychology signifies just about the same
thing.
In his quest for "positive human emotions and motivations," Bet–
telheim consistently reinterprets the evidence in the cheeriest possible
fashion. Thus sadistic impulses, such as the fantasies of some of his boy
patients about tearing out female genitalia, represent only envy (sa–
dism is not mentioned in
Symbolic Wounds).
Initiation rites are not
imposed on the young by the old, but gratify constructive desires in
the young (masochism is not mentioned either); if they are imposed
they are imposed for the youngsters' own good. "What psychoanalysis
has viewed so far as originating mainly in the id, the unconscious, and
as the expression of unintegrated, destructive tendencies, may be much
more the result or expression of ego tendencies that try, through ritual,
to integrate chaotic instinctual desires and anxieties," he writes. In-
