The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

Colin McGinn [“Freud Under Analysis,” NYR, November 4, 1999] fails to distinguish between exposition and demonstration in Freud’s writings. He assumes that the truths of human psychology are self-evident to the thoughtful intellect and that their pursuit requires no more than honest introspection.

“My point then is that I don’t know of any case in which such a lapse of memory on my part is attributable to repression.” He misses the point that in the presence of repression, even the amnestic hiatus is not evident. Parents of adult children often remember sentiments expressed by the children when they were very young but which the children no longer recall nor recognize when they are presented to them as adults. However these very same wishes may appear in the dreams or fantasies of these now adult children; such sentiments are often confirmable by checking with parents or siblings.

Freud’s propositions are derived from and based upon actual clinical experience. Slips of tongue and parapraxes are not important sources of information.

“We typically know the central part of the psychological explanation of our actions.” Do anti-Semites know why they hate Jews? Did Hitler know why he wanted to destroy all of Europe? Do masochists know why they want to be hurt and humiliated? And do sadists know why they wish to accommodate them? Does the depressed patient know why he wishes to die, and does the manic know that or why he wishes ultimately to be defeated? Do we understand the reasons for our moods? Does a man know why one woman appeals to him above all others? It is common to reply to these questions with rationalizations, but rationalization isn’t reason.

Although there is much to challenge in Mc Ginn’s essay, to be practical let me limit my comments to some of his remarks about dream psychology and dream analysis. McGinn questions the proposition that dreams serve to give expression to unfulfilled wishes.

Perhaps I can clarify the situation by taking advantage of information that was not available to Freud one hundred years ago. Mark Solms¹ clearly demonstrates in his anatomical studies that a neurophysiologic system that Jaak Panksepp² calls the seeking system is responsible for initiative and enterprise in the waking animal (and human), and for creating needs during sleep that find their way into dreams. This system (arising in the brain stem, traversing the lateral hypothalamus, and reaching the medial orbital surface of the frontal lobe) depends largely upon dopamine neurotransmission, one of the neurotransmitter systems that remain active even during sleep. Repeatedly during sleep, motivational impulses for the satisfaction of instinctual and other needs and for the resolution of troublesome memories and concerns strive for activation. The dream seems to attempt to attenuate the impulses by finding one or another way of representing them as fulfilled. The hallucinatory fulfillment of these impulses—or wishes, which is what they correspond to in ordinary thought—may result in temporary attenuation, or may elicit a signal that even a thought of fulfillment would elicit great danger so that anxiety appears, or the individual awakens.

The impulses that find their way into dreams are not exclusively unconscious wishes, nor did Freud say they were. If McGinn would reread the writings upon which he depends, he will find that Freud called attention to the fact that all kinds of unfulfilled needs may find their way into dreams. For example, needs for urination or defecation during sleep find their way into the dreams of many people at frequent intervals. The dreams often end with the introduction of some obstacle to the fulfillment of the need, for example one might dream of looking for a toilet but then be unable to find privacy. Characteristically the dreamer will awaken and take care of the need more realistically. Similarly, excessive heat or cold during the night, hunger or thirst, the discomfort of illness will achieve representation during the dream, and an effort will be made to resolve the problem with a dream hallucination. Of course it fails.

“What about common anxiety dreams that represent something feared, not wished for?” Surely it will have occurred to Professor McGinn that many of the things that we devoutly wish are to be feared, for example, to engage in an extramarital affair with the wife of one’s closest friend; to contrive the death of a rival; to tempt fate.

“We could certainly sleep without dreaming—we often do—so that dreams are hardly required to sustain sleep.” The fact is that about thirty minutes after we fall asleep we normally start to dream and continue dreaming to the accompaniment of rapid eye movements for fifteen to twenty minutes. As sleep continues, these rapid eye movement epochs become longer and occur more frequently. Commonly we awaken as the last of these episodes terminates, or shortly thereafter. Sleep does not last very long before an epoch of rapid eye movement accompanied by dreams intrudes.

Since dreaming is activated by the arousal of instinctual needs under the influence of the seeking system, males almost always exhibit penile tumescence during dreaming. Since sleep usually terminates with a dream, whether or not the dream is recalled, they commonly awake with erections. If we do not recognize the dream as a response to instinctual activation, how can we explain the regular occurrence of these erections in the male dreamer (and engorgement in the female)?

“Dreams may be necessary for mental health, but not for the possibility of sleep itself.” It is possible to deprive an individual of dreaming by awakening him whenever the sleeping electroencephalogram demonstrates that an epoch of eye movements is commencing. After a day or two of such deprivation, it becomes impossible for the individual to sleep without immediately falling into a rapid eye movement dreaming sequence.

Let me illustrate by presenting briefly a dream that was reported during the last session before I read McGinn’s article. An aging business executive of some distinction dreamed that one of his younger protégées had deserted him. Then there was another fragment about holding a dog on a leash. And finally there was a fragment about a labyrinthine-like area of hills and ravines. The man had started the session by reporting that two of his close and important friends had recently died, a breach of attachment. I knew that he had been forced to leave his native country as an adolescent because of the Holocaust—another breach of attachment—and had found refuge here where he had achieved extraordinary success. He was seeing me because he was depressed (he was one of the few patients whose depression did not respond to antidepression medication) and there was a good deal of evidence that the main reason for his depression was his recognition that because of his age he was being forced out of the prestigious positions that he had obtained. This was an unwelcome thought to him and even though the evidence had forced him to acknowledge this a number of times, he managed to deny?—suppress?—repress? that realization. The dream too was about breaking attachments: the disappointment by the younger colleague whom he had intended to promote to succeed him, the physical attachment to the dog by the leash, and the fear of not being able to escape the comfort and tranquillity which retirement would have seductively offered to him (the attractive labyrinth). Although these considerations are repressed by day, they contribute heavily to his state of depression and seek representation at night.

Dreams do not deal exclusively with the sexual wishes repressed in early childhood. They may deal with real sources of stress: recent trauma; insistent physiologic homeostatic deviations, repressed, suppressed, or denied; current issues; and powerful but repudiated inclinations such as homosexual sentiments and murderous desires. Any of these may find their way into dreaming consciousness and the dream will attempt to dispose of them as expeditiously as possible. When it succeeds, the dream might or might not be recollected; when it fails the individual might awaken with anxiety.

Clearly, uninformed introspection does not suffice for scientific endeavor, certainly not for psychology.

Mortimer Ostow

President

Psychoanalytic Research and

Development Fund

New York City

To the Editors³ :

Colin McGinn’s piece on Freud is extraordinarily naive. It is as foolish to try to “analyze” Freud sixty years after his death without taking account of what has happened in psychoanalytic thinking in the meantime as it would be to appraise Darwin without locating him in post-Darwinian evolutionary biology. The measure of a thinker is not the correctness of his views but their fruitfulness for later research. Freud started people thinking about child development; he stirred us to look at children as having complex emotional lives. He was wrong about a great many things, for one, how little girls view their bodies, but he made us notice that children have a view of such things, and that it matters.

McGinn is skeptical of the Oedipal complex. Quoting a long passage in which Freud makes a number of claims, McGinn asks: “What is the evidence for this amazing suggestion?” Without noticing that these claims are separable, he then continues: “At the least one would want to see a careful empirical investigation into the desires and fears of male infants, which should not in principle be too hard to obtain” (p. 23). It isn’t hard to obtain. Infant and child studies have proliferated in the last seventy-five years, and they confirm a number of Freud’s observations as they disconfirm some others. Conflicts between autonomy and intimacy, the relations between a child’s self-representations and his representations of others, the different ways in which the need for psychological safety is experienced at different periods in a child’s life, are some of the dimensions of research in child development since Freud.

“Granted that the child obtains pleasure from its mouth and anus, during sucking and defecation; but why insist on calling this sexual pleasure?… These pleasures are not in adulthood sexual in nature, so why are they in the infant?” McGinn asks (p. 23). He seems unaware of the so-called sexual “perversions,” not to mention fore-play. How can we account for the fact that activities like sucking, shitting, and pissing on another, taking in and extruding, along with mastering and being mastered, seeing and being seen, hurting and being hurt, so readily acquire a sexual meaning? Freud’s answer to this quasi-philosophical question is that sexuality begins much earlier than we had thought, that it is not to be identified exclusively with genital sex and procreation, and that it is structured by those bodily activities which bring the infant into daily, intimate, pleasurable, highly charged, and often conflicted contact with its caretakers.

One of Freud’s major lessons is that the world does not come already interpreted but is given the meaning it has for any person in part by what has happened to him, which is itself construed through the lens of his passions, interests, and internal conflicts. Another lesson is that the mind is not the master in its own house. McGinn’s essay reminds us just how hard that lesson is to take in. I am not suggesting that in this very instance McGinn is guided by unconscious biases, but that he writes as if he never were. He reports the “impartiality” of his reading of Freud as confidently as one might report the color of his hair; he says “I don’t know of a single desire or memory I have ever repressed, in Freud’s sense” without a wink.