DANIEL
SHANAHAN
75
comings of Freud's antinarcissism. For while, thanks to Freud's scientific
attitude, psychoanalysis offers man a set of references which draw him
away from self-immersion into a world where cause and effect supersede
mystical beliefs, it was that same attitude (or perhaps an exaggeration of
it) which led Freud
to
abandon the "Project" as too hypothetical, too
subjective, or perhaps even too narcissistic. Barely five weeks after his first
letter to Fleiss he wrote:
I can no longer understand the state of mind in which I hatched
the psycholobry; cannot conceive how I cou ld have inflicted it on you
... to me it appears to have been a kind of madness.
As Pribram and Gill have demonstrated, the "Project" was hardly the
product of a kind of madness. It was, in fact, the product of an intuition
which had, we now know, a high level of verifiability. But so intense
was Freud's antinarcissism that he allowed it to blind him to the accuracy
of the insights the "Project" represented. A thinker of profound intuitive
capabilities, Freud was nonetheless so deeply mistrustful of the unverified
intuitive insight that he preferred to repress such insights - as he did with
the whole of Nietzsche's work - rather than risk what he saw as the
inviolability of scientific thinking. Ironically, such attempts may in the
end have been self-defeating. As Pribram and Gill remark:
.. . it would have been better for Freud to have published the Project
and then set it aside rather than let it fester unseen to degenerate into
untestable metaphor that repeatedly and unpredictably bursts to the
surface in later theorizing.
Had Freud all owed himself a greater receptivity to inspirations such
as the "Project," he might have developed a more balanced, less pes–
simistic model of man. He certainly would have established firmer ground
for psychoanalysis's claim to status as a science, had he pursued the intu–
itions on which the "Project" was based. But more importantly, he
might have learned to see the intuitive and transcendent sides of human
nature, not as aberrations or illusions, but as phenomena with as much to
tell us about man as neurosis.
Probably the greatest lesson we have to learn from the rise of psy–
choanalysis is the fact that man's self-absorbed style of action can no
longer be considered an effective way of dealing with the problems life
throws his way. Man must get outside of himself, recognize where self
ends and otherness begins, and set himself to the task of understanding
