In response to:
The Scar of Sigmund Freud from the October 9, 1980 issue
To the Editors:
Edward Rothstein [NYR, October 9] claims that Freud emerges unscathed from my “Epistemological Liabilities of the Clinical Appraisal of Psychoanalytic Theory” (Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, December 1979). Let me consider the merits of his reasoning.
I wrote (p. 508) that “the purported insight achieved by the patient is not the product of a process of veridical self-discovery, but rather reflects the patient’s conversion to the therapist’s interpretation.” As is patent from my context, I thereby impugned the psychoanalytic reconstruction of the patient’s actual personal history, but not the existence of his self or his personal identity, as Rothstein would have it. Nor do I gainsay the reality of the self as a theoretically inferred entity by asserting with Nisbett and Wilson that introspection does not afford a person privileged epistemic access to the discernment of the causes of his (her) own mental states, as compared to the avenues available to others who observe him (her) externally. Hence I am hardly committed to David Hume’s ontological dissolution of personal identity into a bundle of perceptions, let alone to the literary “deconstructionist” perdition with which Rothstein saddles me.
As William James tells us (Principles of Psychology, I), “The word introspection need hardly be defined—it means, of course, the looking into our minds and reporting what we there discover. Every one agrees that we there discover states of consciousness” (italics in original). And those who assign crucial probative significance to self-observation do so generally, because they maintain that it affords the subject privileged epistemic access to the workings of his (her) mind, while only indirect, inferential avenues to these processes are open to outside observers. Initially, Rothstein does seem to allow that Freud placed just such essential reliance on introspection, since Rothstein speaks of “the introspection which Freud saw as so crucial to his own self-analysis or to his patients’ confirmation of his interpretations.” How then does Rothstein manage to reason that Freud would nonetheless have been quite unruffled by Nisbett and Wilson’s epistemic derogation of privileged access to the causal dynamics of our minds?
He contrives a spurious compatibility by idiolexical legerdemain, first denying the label “introspection” to the patient’s production of free associations and then misconstruing Freud’s technical term “reflection” so as to exempt the deliverances of the analysand’s Freudian reflections from the purview of Nisbett and Wilson’s epistemic disparagement of introspection. But, contrary to Rothstein, Freud’s construal of the scope of introspection hardly excluded the ideas that emerge when the patient associates “freely” by suspending the exercise of conscious censorial selection among his associations, an activity of selection which Freud technically dubbed “reflection” (S.E. 4, pp. 101-102; 12, p. 115; 16, p. 287; 23, p. 174). Nor did he banish this selective activity from the purview of introspection. Indeed, he characterized his advocacy of the psychoanalytic quest overall as a “call to introspection” (S.E. 16, p. 285)! And the analysand’s quest, whose objective Freud epitomized by “Where id was, there ego shall be” (S.E. 22, p. 80), avowedly requires free association no less than the stated kind of reflection. Moreover, since Freud paid high epistemic tribute (S.E. 18, p. 238; 20, p. 41) to the stream of free associations from patients who follow his “fundamental rule of analysis,” he claimed probative reliability for these introspective data (S.E. 23, p. 174). Yet Rothstein categorizes the process in which “we abandon reflection and allow involuntary ideas to emerge” as a “suspension” of introspection! And he insists on confining introspection to “a reflective analysis of the external expressions of mental life.”
By this terminological stratagem, he then speciously denies that Freud ever claimed probative reliability for introspection in the received Jamesian sense of the term employed by Nisbett and Wilson. Concurrently, he blithely ignores that just this Freudian reliance on self-observation as one of the pillars of clinical validation has been devastatingly undermined by empirical findings adduced in my paper: The analyst Judd Marmor has commendably marshaled telling evidence showing that the patient’s “free” associations furnish only spurious confirmation of psychoanalytic interpretations, because they are so highly contaminated by the therapist’s influence after all (Archives of General Psychiatry 22, 1970, p. 161).
It is an utter commonplace that while the patient’s motivations are still being obfuscated by repressed conflicts, his analyst will place little credence in his purported introspective account of the promptings of his own actions. Yet Freudians hold that improved introspection goes hand-in-hand with the patient’s progress toward their therapeutic goal of insight. And it is precisely because analytically conducted self-observation is deemed to afford privileged access to insightful self-knowledge that such refined introspection is judged probatively essential to the clinical validation of the theory. In this vein, the analyst Charles Rycroft explicitly applies the label “self-observation” honorifically to convey “objective self-scrutiny,” when defining “Introspection” in his Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. No wonder that Freud rated the “trustworthiness” of a self-analysis so highly: “In my judgment the situation is in fact more favorable in the case of self-observation than in that of other people” (S.E. 4, p. 105). And furthermore: “In that way one acquires the desired sense of conviction of the reality of the processes described by analysis and of the correctness of its views” (S.E. 15, p. 19). The super-ego is the special agency which Freud credits with the capability for veridical self-observation of the ego (S.E. 17, p. 235; 22, pp. 58, 60).
How can Rothstein deny that Nisbett and Wilson would emphatically discount the confirmation which Freud claimed for his theory of parapraxes on the basis of introspective self-observations made by Storfer, himself, and Lou Andréas Salomé (S.E. 6, pp. 118, 162-163, 168)? For reasons best known to himself, Rothstein seems to think that any such prima facie clash of view is obviated by the role which Freud accorded to the subject’s linguistic rendition of the findings of his (her) conscious introspection. But why should such codification detract from the privileged epistemic access championed by Freud? Evidently Rothstein’s emphasis on the mediation of language is a red herring which serves to sidetrack that Freud did attribute genuine probative value to introspective data. Besides, Rothstein is clutching at straws when trying to document from a 1912 letter to Ernest Jones that Freud would even demote introspection at least as much as Nisbett and Wilson. He cites a cryptic passing remark from that letter without its context (cf. Jones’s Freud, vol. 2, pp. 95-96). In context, however, the remark appears as Freud’s flattery of Jones’s acumen for having discerned a possible dynamically unconscious motive which had eluded Freud himself, a tribute avowedly inspired by Freud’s gratitude for an unspecified major favor from Jones. But on Rothstein’s construal, Freud’s aside would belie well-articulated tenets that Freud laboriously enunciated in diverse publications: For further details see the new enlarged version of my paper in Noûs, vol. 14, September, 1980, pp. 307-385, esp. pp. 354ff.
At the outset, Rothstein altogether misportrayed me as having confined the clinical data which Freudians deem probatively cogent to those furnished by the analysand’s introspections. His ensuing rehearsal of other kinds of clinical data thus carries coals to Newcastle. And this rehearsal as well is unavailing to sustain his thesis that “Nisbett and Ross’s [Wilson’s] experiments, and Grünbaum’s argument, have very little effect then on Freudian theory,” a conclusion hardly shared by a number of recognized analysts who have read my paper.
Adolf Grünbaum
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Edward Rothstein replies:
To anyone who is plunged into the midst of these issues through Professor Grünbaum’s letter, they must seem arcane, entwined, and impenetrable. The truth is, I fear, far more difficult.
Grünbaum’s arguments and my intentions are so different that we are almost speaking different languages. In my essay, I was offering an interpretation of Freud while raising questions about the nature of biographical interpretation, autobiographical activity and the process of psychoanalysis. One theme of my essay was the difficulty of giving such an order to a life, and the even greater difficulties of confirming such interpretations. I began by quoting Freud: “Biographical truth is not to be had,” and ended by saying: “The most important questions still remain. How is an interpretation verified? When, for example, in looking at the words and acts of our lives do we recognize ‘truth’?… Can psychoanalysis be verified?” Where I end is where Grünbaum begins.
I was also attempting to clarify a limited portion of Grünbaum’s critique by refining the idea of “introspection.” My “idiolexical legerdemain” was an attempt to prevent ideological confusion. My “red herring” was intended to be a meaty trout. I was attempting to deal with implications of Grünbaum’s argument, without addressing the “probative” question or engaging in a critique of Nisbett and Wilson’s paper or Grünbaum’s interpretation of it. Such questions, Grünbaum’s letter makes clear, have to be raised.
Nisbett and Wilson themselves do not mention psychoanalysis. They argue, more generally, that while an individual has privileged access to all sorts of details about himself through introspection—memories, for example, or physical sensations—when it comes to understanding more complex mental processes—like causes of actions or feelings—there may be limited introspective access to such information. In fact, they write, “one has no more certain knowledge of the workings of one’s own mind than would an outsider with intimate knowledge of one’s history and of the stimuli present at the time the cognitive process occurred.”
A report may claim to be due to introspection but it is more probably an account of activity deemed plausible according to accepted theories of behavior. I may say, for example, “The reason why I like this person is that he has a pleasant appearance; and there is no use in your arguing with me because I know myself.” Nisbett and Wilson argue that such a report may not only be incorrect about the reason for liking that person, but incorrect about the presumption that it comes from self-examination. They set up experiments in which they can reply: “Ah, you think you are introspecting here, but you are not. We have controlled the circumstances so we know you like this person not because of his appearance but for other reasons.”
Their critique of introspection is not limited to simple feelings. They appeal to accounts of creativity, quoting, for example, Jacques Hadamard’s discussion of mathematical discovery, to show that such processes are also not open to introspection. The artist and scientist do not know how they arrive at their ideas.
Classical psychoanalytic theory also holds (with some variations) that a patient’s introspective reports are often unreliable about the causes for his actions. But after psychoanalysis is completed, “untutored introspection” is replaced by a kind of “tutored introspection” (which Grünbaum calls “analytically rectified introspection”). The patient learns the truth about himself; he is able to scrutinize his mental processes objectively. After an analysis, a patient, with such rectified introspection, would be able to confirm psychoanalytic interpretations of his behavior. He would be able to say, “Why of course that interpretation is correct. I know through examining myself what I did not know before. I wanted to kill my father and marry my mother.” That confirmation of the interpretation would have a significance in clinical proofs of psychoanalysis, because such introspection is “privileged”—it cannot be argued with; its private claims, certified by the theory, are open to no question. The patient himself is able to see the aetiology of the neurosis.
