Freud, Adler and Jung

by Walter Kaufmann

Walter Kaufmann completed this, the third and final volume of his landmark trilogy, shortly before his death in 1980. The trilogy is the crowning achievement of a lifetime of study, writing, and teaching. This final volume contains Kaufmann's tribute to Sigmund Freud, the man he thought had done as much as anyone to discover and illuminate the human mind. Kaufmann's own analytical brilliance seems a fitting reflection of Freud's, and his acute commentary affords fitting company to Freud's own thought. Kaufmann traces the intellectual tradition that culminated in Freud's blending of analytic scientific thinking with humanistic insight to create "a poetic science of the mind." He argues that despite Freud's great achievement and celebrity, his work and person have often been misunderstood and unfairly maligned, the victim of poor translations and hostile critics. Kaufmann dispels some of the myths that have surrounded Freud and damaged his reputation. He takes pains to show how undogmatic, how open to discussion, and how modest Freud actually was. Kaufmann endeavors to defend Freud against the attacks of his two most prominent apostate disciples, Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung. Adler is revealed as having been jealous, hostile, and an ingrate, a muddled thinker and unskilled writer, and remarkably lacking in self-understanding. Jung emerges in Kaufmann's depiction as an unattractive, petty, and envious human being, an anti-Semite, an obscure and obscurantist thinker, and, like Adler, lacking insight into himself. Freud, on the contrary, is argued to have displayed great nobility and great insight into himself and his wayward disciples in the course of their famous fallings-out.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Nonfiction, Biography

552 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Walter Arnold Kaufmann was a German-American philosopher, translator, and poet. A prolific author, he wrote extensively on a broad range of subjects, such as authenticity and death, moral philosophy and existentialism, theism and atheism, Christianity and Judaism, as well as philosophy and literature. He served for over 30 years as a Professor at Princeton University.

He is renowned as a scholar and translator of Nietzsche. He also wrote a 1965 book on Hegel, and a translation of most of Goethe's Faust.

Reviews

[Will · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kaufmann is regrettably too typical a Freudian apologist: he insists on reading Freud against his followers and ignores the basic fact that he established not only an intellectual school but also its doctrine. Instead Kaufmann insists Freud was a psychological individualist on the scale of Nietzsche, something laughably ridiculous today, after the onslaught of anti-Freudian tracts and revisionist biographies published mostly between the early 1980s and late 90s, but (to my mind) beginning with Paul Roazen's Freud and His Followers (1975), a work of once-esteemed scholarship that Kaufmann successfully discredits. Given Kaufmann died before Freud's most serious objectors published their works*, the task of defending Freud isn't exactly difficult, especially when he only has to defend Freud from his least substantive detractors. Those would be Sartre, who in his own lifetime was called out for his bizarre misreadings of Freud, and Karl Popper, who dismissed him only in passing. The case for Freud's importance is barely made: apparently he made science "more poetic"! So did Newton, but I don't think anyone would make a case for his greatness based primarily on that.

The sections on Adler and Jung are mostly ad hominen attacks, though Kaufmann eventually gets around to making fun of Jung's affected erudition. The Jung section is bitterly scathing and actually quite fun to read. On him Kaufmann quotes the Swiss pastor Oskar Pfister:

"These hermeneutic acrobatics which pass off every kind of muck as a higher marmalade of the soul, and all perversions as holy oracles and mysteries, and try to smuggle a little Apollo or Christ into every upset soul, are no good. It is Hegelism [sic] transposed into psychology: everything that is must be reasonable. If only this theory were reasonable!"

Lastly, to anyone perusing this volume's index to locate specifics, every page number I tried was invented. Some examples: Karl Krauss' jokes on psychoanalysis are mentioned on pages 221-222; the index cites pages 25 and 41. Wittgenstein is first mentioned on page 83; the index cites page 18. Joseph Campbell first appears on page 401; the index says 71. Unbelievable.

*Adolf Grünbaum's The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984), Ernest Gellner's The Psychoanalytic Movement (1985), and Frank Cioffi's Freud and the Question of Psuedoscience (1998)

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is simply a pleasure to read Kaufmann, an incisive, vigilant thinker and writer.

Each volume in this series focuses on a figure Kaufmann credits with critical insights into human capabilities, and uses two other figures as counterparts who tried and failed to do the same. For instance, he faults Kant, Heidegger, and Jung for pretending to be systematic, believing they were delineating reality, when actually they were falsely attributing their own character to humanity in general. They were guilty of obscuring their own nature, and in the process, impeded the discovery of the mind.

Goethe, Nietzsche, and Freud are the heroes of these volumes because, whatever their faults (moreso of the latter two) they did not claim to uncover concrete truths, but contributed to a continuous development of thought.

I always struggled with philosophy because I am not a systematic thinker, and I find theory tedious, but Kaufmann is an incisive writer and has a thorny sense of humor that demystifies a lot of these developments.

[Arianne X · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Elephant in the Book

Kaufmann defends Freud against the oft leveled charge of pseudo-science made by Adler and Jung by challenging Adler-Jung conception of science that makes such a charge possible. Freud is likened to Goethe and Nietzsche in that his conception of science was non-dogmatic, non-orthodox and always open to change based on the consideration of new and additional evidence. This is to stress the importance of ongoing development over general rules or universal theories. The fundamental question of course, the elephant in the book so to speak is, whether psychoanalysis is science or pseudo-science. Kaufmann’s position is that Freud’s analysis was important and illuminating even if it did not produce testable, repeated and verifiable propositions that produce general and universal laws in the strict sense of the natural sciences. Kaufmann’s position depends on accepting that psychology is not strictly a natural science and thus not subject to the same verification models and that this does not invalidate it as a science. Freud’s ultimate contribution, like that of Goethe and Nietzsche is in helping us understand what it means to be human. Where learning how to frame the correct questions is an important part of being human. That is, we are left with a Freud that provides much needed illumination, but not genuine scientific explanations when it comes to the ‘science’ of the ‘mind’. It seems to be true of psychology that we accept it as providing understanding without it meeting the strict criteria of a scientific explanation. It is a discipline of study that can be of cognitive value without achieving the coveted mantel of being a natural science. An overzealous application of the standards and methods of the natural sciences to all fields of human understanding results in the dogmatism of scientism, not proper science. Freud was not opposed to understanding psychology in terms of the natural physical process of the material brain, only that when such an approach becomes exhaustive it becomes incomplete. The challenge is that psychology is in part philosophy, part medicine, part social science and part natural science in propositions yet undisclosed. Science is as much imagination as it rigor.

Kaufmann lists and defends, now taken for granted, Freud’s contributions to human understanding which include the following list. But for Kaufmann what is most important is not general principles or universal laws, but rather the gaining of a better understanding of mental life and thus the human condition. Freud was not a dogmatic in that he willingly considered objections and alternatives. Freud asks us to think honesty about our lives.

Freud’s contributions include:

Recognizing the limitations of formal theory and difficulty with general rules when it comes to self-understanding and understanding others

The need to treat ostensibly physical ailments by addressing the mind

The importance of childhood experiences and relationships

Recognition and understanding of mental illness

Introduction of the new talking therapy in place of dubious techniques of hypnosis. This proved to be the basis of later group therapy

The importance of sex

Interpretation of dreams

The Psychopathology of daily life

Psychological understanding of art, literature and religion

Interpreting the unconscious and the mechanisms of repression

Following from Goethe and Nietzsche, the importance of development over being

He taught us to be honest and face ourselves without guilt

The trouble Freud had in breaking with Adler and Jung was that in doing so he appeared to be intolerant, unscientific and as a prompter of orthodoxy, but if he did not break with Adler and Jung he would be seen as endorsing their views even when they were opposed to him making Freud look as if he was contradicting himself. With all this, Freud never claimed to be able to explain every nuance and aspect of human behavior nor solve every case or cure every patient. As Freud knew, no single theory can explain human behavior, it can at most remove some of the mystery. Just with this much, Freud must be considered to one the great contributors to human self-understanding.

The Gurus, Adler and Jung

Alfred Adler and the (his) inferiority of the Inferiority Complex.

With gurus, we find not the seeking of knowledge but the seeking of confirmation for convinced believers. What is interesting is not that Adler and Jung broke with Freud, rather but they were together all or for as long as they were. Alder grew to find Freudian theories as absurd. He thought that the process of psychoanalysis itself was inimical to human well-being. Alderian concepts revolved around the ‘inferiority complex’, ‘masculine protest’, ‘aggression drive’, resentment and the contrast in human relations of being ‘above’, ‘below’, ‘over’ and ‘under’ as well as the advancement of a person and the enhancement of personality at the expense and devaluation of others. In a great failing, due to his prudish dogmatic Protestantism, Adler took no notice of the importance of sex and the desire for pleasure as did Freud.

Although Adler did not coin the phrase “Inferiority Complex”, it was his central contribution to the field of psychology along with the notion of ‘Individual Psychology’ as well as the idea of the ‘family constellation’ as appose to psychoanalysis. Adler first named his approach to psychology ‘Free Psychoanalysis’ to emphasis his break with Freud. Adler is known for the phrase “There is no absolute truth, but what comes closest to it is the human community” meaning that he cared more for the human community than he did for the ‘truth’. That is, unlike Freud, Adler was far more concerned with therapy than theory.

Carl Jung the Nazi Psychologist and his mythology of archetypes.

Archetypes are at best a distraction from understanding of what it means to be human and at worst, a misleading mythology that lapses into mysticism explaining nothing. Plainly said, archetypes do not exist. As such, they cannot be discovered. There are no archetypes to be found that we do not ourselves create. The real question is, why do we create archetypes and then convince ourselves that we discover them with our task being how to apply them. They are more a product of rationalist philosophy and structures of the mind dating back to Kant, Leibniz and Plato. Archetypes are developed with a profoundly unhistorical approach. Archetypes as such are social and cultural creations, not universal or timeless symbols valid for all humans. To an extent, Jung built his archetypes on Freud’s concept of a universal symbolic language valid for all human being which is equally dubious as well as his own equally dubious idea about the collective unconsciousness, such as the mythical Aryan unconscious that he admires and fictional Jewish unconscious he deplores. He thought that human minds were constituted in such a way to allow the sharing of certain ideas and symbols by all people everywhere and in all ages. Such a notion finds its roots in Kant, Descartes and Plato and before them the Orphic traditions of Egypt from which Plato learned and as well as the that Zoroastrian religion of the ancient Persians. The collective unconsciousness was Jung mistaking his own neurosis for something true about all human beings in an impressive over generalization. Jungian archetypes are an example of cognitive bias in an attempt at self-justification. There are no ideas or thoughts in the world for us to find. Thoughts and ideas are radically isolated in human beings. We project them onto the world and then congratulate ourselves on discovering something about the world. There is no direct objective experience of the world or observations of the world that reveals the existence of archetypes, this is just silly. This is the basis of religion. The encounter with the world can be overwhelming, so these archetypes are just one way of trying to rationalize experience and organize it upon faulty grounds. The invention of archetypes is a way of making the world malleable to ourselves. We make the world malleable because we are malleable. Archetypes are vague and loosely defined with spaces and gaps between the neatly arranged twelve wedges of the archetype pie giving a sense of false precision and completeness. Why should we assume that they provide a collectively exhaustive blueprint of organization for what we pleasing call reality? There are such things as public opinion and social consensus, but this does not rise to the level of a shared unconscious collective - which approaches occultism. There are shared values and cultural paradigms, but these do rise to the level of archetypes.

Other than the mythology of archetypes, Jung is best known for his muddled contrast of the so called introverted and extroverted personality profiles or character types. Jung defined extrovert to mean one who orients themselves on the basis of external facts while the introvert interposes their perspective between themselves and external facts. Oddly, Jung in his ‘Psychology of Types’ employs the dichotomy between introvert and extrovert in an over simplified explanation of the differences Freud (extrovert) and Adler & Nietzsche (introvert). Not only is this an over simplification, it is most likely reversed. It is difficult to see how any coherent theory could come from such a simple bifurcated topology. I think it much more likely that most people reside on a spectrum of introvert-extrovert or have characters of each and muddle mix of both that manifest in different circumstances and under different conditions. There are no pure types or cases lending themselves to these easy classifications. As with archetypes, all such over simplified classification schemes are a human invention and do exit in nature.

[Erik Graff · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the third and final volume of Kaufmann's late publication, 'Discovering the Mind'. Heroes in that quest are primarily Goethe, Nietzsche and Freud. The most negative portrayal is that afforded Heidegger. Kant, Hegel, Buber, Adler and Jung get mixed reviews.

Of the lot, I'm familiar with them all but most familiar with Kant and Jung. Kaufmann's portrayal of Kant did not impress me as either fair or accurate except insofar as Kant's texts might be criticized for their style and for poor proofreading and editing. The portrayal of Jung, which I expected to be very offensive, Jung having been of enormous influence during college years, was better than expected, Kaufmann's criticisms being understandable, his reconstruction of Jung's break with Freud being plausible.

As a whole this trilogy was not impressive, it feeling like an expression of the accumulation of resentments of a lifetime. There are too many repetitions, even some typos, and much of the text is vague. While the appropriations of Nietzsche and Freud might inspire a neophyte to read them, the rest of the representations would serve only as turn-offs, not as a constructive starting point for further study. Kaufmann, the author is excellent intellectual biographies of Nietzsche and Hegel, is not well-represented by this work.