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instinct in
New Ways in Psychoanalysis,
"paralyzes any effort to
search in the specific cultural conditions for reasons which make for
destructiveness. It must also paralyze efforts to change anything
in
these conditions.
If
man is inherently destructive and consequently
unhappy, why strive for a better future?" In his more articulate striv–
ings, befitting a social psychologist, Fromm found the gloomy fixities
of biological instincts equally incompatible with hopes of improving
the human condition by first making over society. Sullivan, from
a very different background in clinical psychiatry, primarily with
psychotics, came to similar conclusions. All three have influenced
one another, first by their publications, later through direct discussion
and a kind of uneasy collaboration. Their views and approaches, how–
ever, remain different enough so that one can choose to be a Horney–
ite, a Frommian, or a Sullivanite, and in some cases, like that of
Clara Thompson, one can make several of these choices in succession.
The leading neo-Freudians, as well as their shifting followers,
appear to be entirely sincere and dedicated psychoanalysts and psy–
chiatrists, convinced by developments in the social sciences or their own
clinical experience that Freud was culture-bound, masculine-biased,
cancer-morbid, or for some reason blind to what they can see. The
result of their revisions has nevertheless, in my opinion, been not to
improve or modernize psychoanalysis, but to abandon its key insights
both as a science and as a philosophy. Their effect has been to re–
repress whatever distasteful or tragic truths Freud dug out of
his
own unconscious or his patients', and to convert the familiar device
of resistance into revisionist theory.
Freud always believed that "prudish America" would welcome
his theories and water them down with equal enthusiasm, and
his
expectation has not been disappointed. The passion of Americans
for constant reassurance that they live in the Garden of Eden (which
Horney characteristically refers to as "the greater freedom from
dogmatic beliefs which I found
in
this country") was in evidence as
far back as 1912, when Jung wrote Freud from America that he
was having great success in overcoming resistance to psychoanalysis
by playing down sexuality, and Freud wrote back that he need not
boast, since "the more he sacrificed of the hard-won truths of psycho–
analysis, the less resistance he would encounter." Even predicting
this American bowdlerization, however, Freud could hardly have
