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PARTISAN REVIEW
"absolute, primary narcissism"; "narcissistic regression" was what Freud
called this reversion to the earliest stages of consciousness, and he consid–
ered it a mental dysfunction, a neurosis.
Narcissistic neurosis was the physical dysfunction least accessible to
psychoanalytic cure, but for both narcissistic neuroses and transference
neuroses (which were accessible to psychoanalytic treatment), Freud's
remedy was the same: Psychic distance had to be put between the patient
and the disturbance that caused his symptoms. Freud felt that the psycho–
analyst must educate the patient in distanced, dispassionate self-awareness
if the patient were to understand the neurosis and see it to a satisfactory
resolution.
This intense polarity in the relationship between narcissism and psy–
choanalysis demonstrates the primary emphasis of the psychoanalytic tech–
nique: Freud saw psychoanalysis as a tool for growth through demystifi–
cation of the psyche and greater familiarity with its workings. His pes–
simism about human nature did not keep Freud from remaining adamant
in his contention that human behavior must be drawn out of the shadow
of mystery and superstition and brought into the light of careful scientific
scrutiny. Above all, Freud felt, a psychoanalyst must be an educator; he
must uncover the depths of the human psyche for the uneducated and
thereby dispel the uncertainty and ignorance that surrounded it.
The tool Freud created to achieve the demystification of the self,
psychoanalysis, has, as many of its critics have pointed out, a normative
model of man.
It
favors the development of generalized human traits,
not particularized ones. Psychoanalysis stressed form, partly as a way of
creating a structured set of references which man could use to secure a
firm hold on the self But the normative and formalistic approach which
psychoanalysis inherited from Freud is really only a superficial characteris–
tic of one of Freud's deepest and most influential predispositions, his
belief in science and the scientific method. As we have seen, Freud was
trained as a scientist; he began his career as a neurologist, and he carried
over the empirical, naturalistic, even materialistic predispositions of his
scientific training into his psychoanalytic research. But while
commentators are willing to recognize that Freud saw himself as a scien–
tist and attempted to uphold the scientific method throughout his career,
there seems to be some hedging as to whether Freud actually was a sci–
entist.
Freud's scientific attitude is important to us in that it represents an
attitude characteristic of his approach, and, when applied to the notion
of the self, is characteristic of a whole trend, and a dominant one at that,
in modern thought. As Erich Fromm put it:
