Thought Manipulation: The Use and Abuse of Psychological Trickery (24 page)

However, as stated throughout, every social phenomenon in human life cannot be fully explained by one formula. Accordingly, I have viewed the contradictory approaches of Freud and Szasz as complementary. For this purpose, I have sketched general guidelines for an imaginary scene: Freudian analyst meets Szaszian patient. Our “exemplary meeting” between Freudian analyst and Szaszian patient is only a model. Like most models, it is a simplification of complicated and problematic interactions. However, models, like myths, may offer lessons, and the lesson from our imaginary-realistic scenario is that human beings, including well-trained analysts operating out of the best intentions, are limited and can easily make mistakes. To diminish harm, the psychoanalytic interaction should be conducted according to general rules that give a structure to the undertaking.

Our simple model, a competition between two swindlers (Freudian therapist and Szaszian patient) can improve the psychoanalysis framework. Analyzing the different moves of the two players in this imaginary interaction can be a valuable instrument for examining, evaluating, and improving the rules of the psychotherapeutic game. This research program is extremely important for a critical discussion upon three central motives in the controversy between Freud and Szasz: manipulation, responsibility, and successful therapy.

NOTES

1. For the most part, Freud writes about his female patients, at least in the articles I am referring to. Therefore, I employ the third-person singular feminine.

2. Of course, one of the lessons is that any manipulator might fall victim to his own trap. This lesson is valid to manipulative behaviors in the best of intentions and even for the most benevolent causes. Compare to Agassi, J., “Deception: A View from the Rationalist Perspective,” in
The Mythomanias: The Nature of Deception and Self -deception
, Ed. Michael S. Myslobodsky (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996), 24: “Many philosophers have noted that people who habitually deceive might fall for their own deceptions.”

3. Compare to Agassi’s comments upon Bertrand Russel’s “fool’s paradise” (“Deception,” 1996): “A fool’s paradise is not a place, but a state of mind; it is a system of opinions, of assessments of situations, that calms one down, that reassures one into the opinion that all is well, even when all is far from well. Fools may be ignorant of the severity of their situations, perhaps because being well informed tends to get them into a panic. This happens regularly, and there is little that can be done about it, except that the wise would still prefer to be well informed so as to try to cope with the panic more constructively.”

4. See Freud, Sigmund, “The Future of an Illusion,” in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
21: 3–56, Translated by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, [1927] 1968).

5. Compare to Popper, K. R.,
Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge
(New York and London: Routledge, [1963] 1989), 49: “I may perhaps mention here a point of agreement with psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts assert that neurotics and others interpret the world in accordance with a personal set pattern which is not easily given up, and which can often be traced back to early childhood. A pattern or scheme which was adopted very early in life is maintained throughout, and every new experience in interpreted in terms of it; verifying it, as it were, and contributing to its rigidity...I am inclined to suggest that most neuroses may be due to a partially arrested development of the critical attitude; to an arrested rather than a natural dogmatism; to resistance to demands for the modification and adjustment of certain schematic interpretations and responses. This resistance in its turn may perhaps be explained, in some cases, as due to an injury or shock, resulting in fear and in an increased need for assurance or certainty, analogous to the way in which an injury to a limb makes us afraid to move it, so that it becomes stiff.”

6. Freud changed essential parts of his theories many times. One version of the previous description is known as Freud’s trauma and catharsis theories. Agassi summarizes it in few concise sentences (“Deception,” 34–35): Freud “...attempted to explain the way some private prejudices have a strong hold on the minds of their victims: He was impressed by the fact that neuroses constitute intellectual blind spots, especially when the neurotics who sustain them are intelligent. He explained this by his theory of the emotional trauma (trauma means wound)...The cause of every neurosis, he suggested, is a trauma caused by some frightening, painful childhood event. Initially, the trauma leads to an attempt to cope with it by conjecturing a hypothesis. Being infantile, this hypothesis is not surprisingly of a low intellectual level. What is surprising is that the neurotic never gets over the initial hypothesis. This, Freud explained, is due to two facts. First, reliving the traumatic incident is painful. Second, one attempts to avoid that pain...Therefore, the purpose of psychoanalytic treatment should be liberating neurotics from the prejudices that are at the base of their neurotic conduct, which incapacitates them. This, according to Freud, can be achieved only by helping them relive their initial traumatic experiences. Once this is achieved, patients experience strong relief and a sense of catharsis....”

7. See Szasz, T. S.,
The Myth of Mental Illness
(New York: Harper & Row, 1974).

8. Ibid., 44.

9. Ibid., 32–47.

10. Ibid., 119.

11. See, for example, Wyatt, C. R., “Liberty and the Practice of Psychotherapy: An Interview with Thomas Szasz,” 4 (2001),
http://www.psychotherapy.net/interview/Thomas_Szasz
.

12. See, for example, Szasz (
The Myth of Mental Illness
, 259): “...I believe that the aim of psychoanalytic therapy is, or should be, to maximize the patient’s choices in the conduct of his life...our goal should be to enlarge his choices by enhancing his knowledge of himself, others, and the world around him, and his skills in dealing with persons and things...we should try to enrich our world and try to help our patients to enrich their...”

13. Compare to Wyatt (“Liberty and the Practice of Psychotherapy,” 14): “The situation is similar to what happens in school, especially at the university level.”

14. According to Freud’s view, one of the main goals of psychoanalysis is to “turn neurotic misery into normal human unhappiness.” Indeed, according to Freud’s paradigm every human being is destined to suffer, but the mental patients’ suffering is beyond the “normal” level of misery.

15. Indeed, Freud (“Observations on Transference-Love,” in
Standard Edition
12: 157–174, London: Hogarth Press, [1914] 1915, 160–161) warns the analyst against being led astray by the patient’s affections for him: “He must recognize that the patient’s falling in love is induced by the analytic situation and is not to be attributed to the charms of his own person; so that he has no grounds whatever for being proud of such a ‘conquest,’ as it would be called outside analysis. And it is always well to be reminded of this. For the patient, however, there are two alternatives: either she must relinquish psychoanalytic treatment or she must accept falling in love with her doctor as an inescapable fate.”

16. Freud (“Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
Vol. 7: 7–122, London: Hogarth, [1901] 1905, 118), explains: “What are transferences? They are new editions or facsimiles of the impulses and fantasies which are aroused and made conscious during the process of analysis; but they have this peculiarity, which is characteristic for their species, that they replace some earlier person by the person of the physician.” At this point I would like to offer a few comments. The first is that Freud (“Observations on Transference-Love,” 168–169) claims that “being in love in ordinary life, outside analysis, is also more similar to abnormal than to normal mental phenomena. Nevertheless, transference-love is characterized by certain features which ensure it a special position. In the first place, it is provoked by the analytic situation; secondly, it is greatly intensified by the resistance, which dominates the situation; and thirdly, it is lacking to a high degree in regard to reality, is less sensible, less concerned about consequences and more blind in its valuation of the loved person than we are prepared to admit in the case of normal love.” But, on the other hand, Freud emphasizes that “we should not forget, however, that these departures from the norm constitute precisely what is essential about being in love.”

The second is that sometimes it seems that Freud defends himself against possible allegations concerning questionable moral aspects of transference-love. He claims that transference-love is not particular to psychoanalysis but is likely to appear in almost every situation involving contact with neurotic people. (Of course, the question as to who is neurotic and who is not, especially according to Freud, is a difficult one.) Therefore, the phenomenon pertains to mental problems of certain people and perhaps not to the therapeutic modality: “It is not the fact that the transference in psychoanalysis develops more intensely and immoderately than outside it. Institutions and homes for the treatment of nervous patients by methods other than analysis provide instances of transference in its most excessive and unworthy forms, extending even to complete subjection, which also show its erotic character unmistakably...This peculiarity of the transference is not, therefore, to be placed to the account of psychoanalysis but is to be ascribed to the neurosis itself.” Freud, S., “The Dynamics of the Transference,” in Collected Papers Vol. II (London: Hogarth Press, [1912] 1956), 314–315.

17. See, for example, Freud (Freud, “Observations on Transference-Love,” 170).

18. See Freud, Sigmund, “Turnings in the Ways of Psychoanalytic Therapy,” in Collected Papers Vol. II: 392–402 (London: Hogarth Press, [1919] 1956), 392: “...our hope is to achieve this by exploiting the patient’s transference to the person of the physician, so as to induce him to adopt our conviction of the inexpediency of the repressive processes established in childhood and of the impossibility of conducting life on the pleasure-principle.”

19. Indeed, Freud presents four options (Freud, “Observations on Transference-Love,” 160): “If a woman patient has fallen in love with her doctor it seems to such a layman that only two outcomes are possible. One, which happens comparatively rarely, is that all circumstances allow of a permanent legal union between them; the other, which is more frequent, is that the doctor and the patient part and give up the work they have begun which was to have led to her recovery, as though it had been interrupted by some elemental phenomenon. There is, to be sure, a third conceivable outcome, which even seems compatible with a continuation of the treatment. This is that they should enter into a love-relationship which is illicit and which is not intended to last forever. But such a course is made impossible by conventional morality and professional standards.” Of course, it is not so difficult to imagine that Freud would vote for the fourth option, which is to direct the erotic love of the patient for the benefit of the analysis.

20. To concretize this argument Freud describes the situation of a patient who is constantly falling in love with her analysts (Freud, “Observations on Transference-Love,” 160): “After the patient has fallen in love with her doctor, they part; the treatment is given up. But soon the patient’s condition necessitates her making a second attempt at analysis, with another doctor. The next thing that happens is that she feels she has fallen in love with this second doctor too; and if she breaks off with him and begins yet again, the same thing will happen with the third doctor, and so on. This phenomenon, which occurs without fail and which is, as we know, one of the foundations of psychoanalytic theory...”

21. See Freud, “Observations on Transference-Love,” 165–166.

22. No doubt Freud was aware that such falling in love is problematic. Therefore, he recommended that patients not make major decisions during the period of psychoanalysis. For a further discussion, see Hinshelwood, R. D.,
Therapy or Coercion: Does Psychoanalysis Differ from Brainwashing
? (London: Karnac, 1997), 98.

23. See Szasz, T. S. “Does Insanity ‘Cause’ Crime?” Ideas on Liberty 50 (2000): 31–32. Szasz opens this paper with a quotation that concisely reflects his opinion: “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason”—Gilbert K. Chesterton.

24. See Szasz (
The Myth of Mental Illness
, 228).

25. See, for example, Szasz, T. S., “Hayek and Psychiatry,” Liberty 16 (2002): 19.

26. Compare to Szasz (
The Myth of Mental Illness
, 223): “The medical situation, like the family situation which it often imitates, is, of course, a traditionally rich source of lies. The patients, like children, lie to the doctor. And the physicians, like parents, lie to the patients. The former lie because they are weak and helpless and cannot get their way by direct demands; the latter lie because they want their wards to know what is “good” for them. Infantilism and paternalism are thus sources of and models for deception in the medical and psychiatric situations.”

27. See, for example, Hayek, F A.,
The Road to Serfdom
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944).

28. Constitutional economics, which places “in close neighborhood to the social contract tradition in moral philosophy,” concentrates upon a similar problem: “It focuses, in particular, on the question of how people may realize mutual gains by their voluntarily joint commitment to rules (Buchanan 1991: 81ff). Or, in short, constitutional economics...incurring into how people may realize mutual gains from joint commitment, i.e. from jointly accepting suitable constraints on their behavioral choices.” See Vanberg, V., “Market and State: The Perspective of Constitutional Political Economy,” Journal of Institutional Economics 1 (1) (2005): 28.

29. Szasz sees the “therapeutic” interaction as a contract between two free individuals, and this contract, as is true for almost every contract, is subject to certain ethical constraints. The acceptance test is that the patient is willing to come voluntarily to the sessions and even pay the analyst substantial money for seeing him. See, for example, Wyatt, “Liberty and the Practice of Psychotherapy.”