BOOKS
MORALS AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
FREUD: THE MIND OF THE MORALIST.
By
Philip Rieff. Viking.
$6.00.
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND MORAL VALUES.
By
Heinz Hllrtmllnn.
Intern<ltionlll Universities Press. $3.00.
Can one derive an ethic from a psychology and its
psychotherapeutic method? Freud himself maintained the physi–
cian's and scientist's neutrality on problems of moral conduct, while
cOllducting his private life according to his own strict moral code.
There is no contradiction here, if we understand that moral neu–
trality is the necessary condition for scientific investigation and is
not the condition for governing behavior or instinctual drives. Freud
specifically disclaimed the use of psychoanalysis as a guide to the
right conduct of life. And yet Philip Rieff is right when he claims
that nonetheless there are intellectual and moral implications in the
writings of Freud. Ideas that have played a crucial role in the moral
revolution of our time, though neutral in the scientific sense, have
lost moral neutrality upon challenging established beliefs and alter–
ing man's image of himself.
Ironically many of the cultural changes which psychoanalysis
produced were not, strictly speaking, derived from psychoanalytic
theory or therapy but were magnificent errors in interpretation,
ideas that lost their identities while traveling. Repression, for ex–
ample, first introduced by Freud in 1895 as a factor in neurosis,
emerged later in the popular culture as a psychic evil, the deterrent
to health, happiness and successful art. Between 1900 and 1905
Freud began to see that the mechanism that he had isolated in
hysteria was a normal and indispensable component of psychic
functioning, that repression was not in itself pathological. From ap–
proximately 1905 until the present a correct statement of Freud's
views on repression would include these two points: (1) repression
