Royal Institute of Philosophy

Freud and the Freedom of the Sane

Author(s): R. A. Sharpe
Source: Philosophy, Vol. 55, No. 214 (Oct., 1980), pp. 485-496
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal Institute of Philosophy
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Freud and the Freedom of the
Sane
R. A. SHARPE

It is commonly allowed that madmen have no liberty.

David Hume

Freud seems to have been torn between a literary and a scientific model
for his enterprises. On the one hand he stresses the scientific nature
of his researches to an extent which makes the suspicious reader wonder
whether he protests too much. On the other hand it is well known that
he regarded many writers, though predominantly Shakespeare, as anticipa-
ting his findings on the unconscious. In one famous passage in the Intro-
ductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis he places his discovery of the un-
conscious on a par with the discoveries of Darwin and Copernicus in
their effect upon man's picture of himself.1 He is justified, of course, and
if we add Marx to this triumvirate we add a figure even closer to Freud
in claiming a scientific status for his work, a scientific status which is,
to the uncommitted, dubious. Theodore Mischel2 argues that Freud
increasingly construes neurotic behaviour upon the model of ordinary
intentional behaviour and, though he continued to show interest in the
view that the unconscious impulses which are repressed are physiological
in nature, this ideal of a reduction of the psychological to the physiological
became a less active ingredient in his published work as his collaboration
with Fliess receded into the past. So although he may have paid lip service
to some form of psycho-physical identity, believing that mental phenomena
are ultimately no more or less than physical happenings in the neurones
of the brain, in mature Freud this seems to have been an idly spinning
wheel. Roy Schafer has recently pointed out3 that many of Freud's fol-
lowers use the concepts of natural science (force, energy and discharge,
etc.), whilst simultaneously retaining traces of anthropomorphism in their
metapsychology. For instance Heinz Hartmann emphasizes the concept
of a 'higher organizing function' which resists formulation in the mechan-

1 IntroductoryLectureson Psycho-analysis,Pelican Freud Library, I, 326.

2
'UnderstandingNeurotic Behaviour',Understanding Persons,T. Mischel (ed.)
(Blackwell, I974). In part Freud returns here to a still earliertheory.
3 'Action: Its Place in Psycho-analytic Interpretationand Theory', Annals
of Psycho-analysisI (I973).

Philosophy55 I980 485

R. A. Sharpe

istic metapsychology he favours. Similar difficulties obtrude in the work of

Waelder and Kohut. The significance of these conflicts leads Schafer to
frame basic Freudian insights in terms of the theory of action, stressing
the manner in which an action may be described in differing ways and
thus allowing us to present the fact that a patient's behaviour may both
tell and not tell us of his deepest anxieties. Yet curiously Schafer denies
that freedom plays any part in his account whereas we would have expected
a concept so central to agency to have an equally central role in any re-
casting of psycho-analysis in terms of the theory of action.
Whilst I share Schafer's conviction that action is crucial to any attempt
to understand the nature of Freudian explanation, we cannot dismiss the
question of human freedom. Indeed the puzzle I wish to tackle in this
paper is what sort of explanation Freud can give of the subjective experience
of loss of freedom experienced by neurotics. People who suffer from phobias
or obsessions find their freedom to act thereby reduced. I shall argue that
a Freudian understanding of this loss of freedom requires the physiological
model of the sort described in the Project but that it is difficult to regard
this model as much more than a metaphor. There remains a fundamental
incoherence in the Freudian account of the behaviour of neurotics.
Loss of freedom might seem even more apparent in schizophrenics
and others of the more extreme cases of psychosis. Freud, however, rarely
paid much attention to these cases and did not claim that analysis could
help the insane. He does, though, consider one rather extraordinary case
in some detail. The case of Dr Schreber, like the study of Jensen's story
Gradiva, is a second-hand attempt at analysis, here based upon the auto-
biography of a paranoid; Der wiirdigkeiteneines Nervenkranken (Memoirs
of a Neurotic) was published in I903.4 This is a frank defence of the delu-
sions of a paranoid coupled with the claim that his symptoms are not
sufficiently disturbing to merit his incarceration. He suffered from nervous
disorders on two occasions, firstly, when he stood as a candidate for the
Reichstag and secondly when he became President of the Senate. The
first illness was short lived and occurred in 1884-85; the second was much
more severe and began in I893. Schreber was a highly intelligent and
articulate man and his delusions took a particularly complex and fascinating
form. Indeed one of his reasons for publishing his memoirs was his desire to
contribute to religious progress. When his civil rights were restored in 1902
the judgment summarized his belief system. 'He believed that he had a
mission to reform the world and to restore it to its lost state of bliss. This,
however, he could only bring about if he were first transformed from a
man into a woman.'
This case differs from those histories of neurotics which we will consider
in that Schreber, typically amongst sufferers from this sort of condition,

4 CollectedPapers,3 (case studies), 342.

486
 Freud and the Freedom of the Sane

seems to have lost the capacity to recognize what is the case, a capacity
he presumably once enjoyed. He thus differs from the irrational man,
not so much in the contents of his beliefs, because many people have the
strangest conceptions, but in his ability to see what the truth is. In
contrast, the man who is irrational may, through self-deception or laziness
or from a variety of other causes, fail to tailor his beliefs to the facts.
Whilst he retains the capacity to do so, however, he remains sane but
irrational. Part of the task of philosophy is to impart techniques of analysis
with which we may subject our beliefs to critical examination. When we
say that a man who is irrational is free we mean that he could apply, or
could learn and then apply, methods of criticism by means of which he
could enlighten himself or learn from the objections of others.
As I have observed, Freud has no explicit or implicit account of the
unfreedom of sufferers from these more severe conditions which fall, in our
rough and ready classification, under the heading of psychoses. So in this
paper I concentrate, faute de mieux, on the account which Freud could
have given and occasionally suggests, of the unfreedom of the neurotic.
Since the phenomenon of subjective loss of freedom is our starting
point, it may be as well to spend some time illustrating this fact about
neurotic patients. In the clinical study of the patient who has become known
as the rat man,5 Freud describes the curious ritual the patient acted out.
He would be at his desk working between midnight and one o'clock;
finding it difficult to concentrate he would then go downstairs and open
the door to an imagined visitor. Having closed the door, he then undressed
and examined his penis in the hall mirror. Freud construes this as the rat
man's attempt to placate his father by showing how hard he was working (at
a time when others were in bed) and yet to defy his father by masturbating
(the act of examining himself in the mirror). The rat man's helplessness in
the face of these compulsions comes over very clearly in the clinical record.
Phobias are perhaps more familiar. May I instance the recently reported
case of a woman unable to enter any lavatory which had an overhead
cistern. In a strange house she required a friend who would act as a scout
before she could use the lavatory. As a third and lengthier example, let me
quote from a very interesting personal record of mental illness, W. S.
Stewart's The Divided Mind. 6 Stewart was an intelligent and articulate man
(a Cambridge graduate, no less, as Sir Cyril Burt so pertinently observes
in his foreword) and something of a poet. He was forced to give up his
career as a schoolmaster by an illness which involved extreme depression,
apathy and anxiety, indeed the classic neurotic symptoms, and eventually,
whilst in hospital, flowered into elaborate rituals which he describes as
follows:

5 Ibid., 484.
6 Allen and Unwin, I964, I9off.

487
R. A. Sharpe

I have never been subject to any experience so strange, or, at its onset,
so terrifying. In its purely physical manifestations it was a series of
rhythmic movements, contraction and relaxation of various muscles and
manipulation by the hands and fingers in a kind of massage. It would start
with the fingers of both hands locked at the back of the neck, while
the thumbs exerted a strong but varying pressure at each side of the
windpipe, digging in deeply at the base of the neck where it widens
to join the shoulders. Then the thumbs and fingers would play with
gentle circular movements and pressures over the face and head,
sometimes turning the lobes of the ears clockwise and counter-clockwise,
then doing the same with the whole ear, then pressing the circumference
of the eyeballs in from each side towards the nose, and so on.
This elaborate massage would go on from the head, face and neck
downwards over the whole body, in a series of movements so complicated
that if I had had to learn them from a manual of instructions it would have
taken me months. Sometimes these exercises would last an hour or an hour
and a half at a stretch, without repetition. They are really indescribable to
anyone who has not suffered them. It was as though the hands and body
took on a life of their own and performed these immensely elaborate and
complicated rituals without reference to the mind, automatically. Or,
as I thought of it then, as though they were possessed by another
mind, more powerful and complex than my own. My own conscious
mind, so far from co-operating, would protest in panic and exhaustion,
as the body went on its strange way. But however much the mind
protested, these involved and ritualistic movements would continue to
their appointed end...
I had a gold fob-watch on a chain and this to me was a symbol of
eternity, sometimes of the world, or the whole universe. I would take
it out and swing it slowly in a circle from the end of its chain, then clasp
it in the palms of my hands till it was hidden, and finally wind the chain
three times round the body of the watch and clasp the whole tightly. All
these were compulsive actions, many at the dictation of the Voice.

Indisputably, as Szasz points out, these patients all suffer a 'subjective'

sense of loss of freedom. I intend a minimum of theoretical overtones to
this 'subjective sense' of loss of freedom. It merely records the phenomen-
ological fact that these patients felt themselves compelled to act as they
did or unable to act in the specified way. It is, if you like, the opposite
of the phenomenological sense of freedom which most of us feel in ordinary
contexts and which, no doubt, Dr Johnson had in mind when he uttered
his famous riposte.
As I have said, Freud was a fairly conventional determinist of a standard
nineteenth-century sort. In the fullness of time he expected a theory
which would enable us to explain and predict mental phenomena as an

488
 Freud and the Freedom of the Sane

offshoot of the physiological explanation of the firing of neurones and

synapses. Whether Freud was an epiphenomenalist or a proto-Australian
materialist has been discussed but need not detain us. It is a familiar fact
that he believed that all events are caused and one may find an echo of
this in the rhetorical question that took Wittgenstein's fancy, 'Do you
want to say, gentlemen, that changes in mental phenomena are guided
by chance?' However, whilst paying his respects to this general conception,
when he comes to discuss individual dreams, jokes, and slips of the tongue
he uses concepts like 'meaning' and, 'sense'. He talks about the sense of
dreams and parapraxes. Dreams, parapraxes and neurotic rituals have
significance and their explanation is not to be found merely in terms of
their being effects of some cause. In the circumstances it is understandable
that some have viewed Freudian explanations as a species of hermeneutics.
Consistent with this picture is the fact that mental illness is unlike
physical illness in certain important respects. For the form the symptoms
of hepatitis take are not, I imagine, culture-dependent. Whether one comes
from Croydon or Calcutta, the disease will show symptoms invariant
with respect to the social milieu of the patient. But the rat man's neurotic
ritual could only have the significance Freud ascribed to it in a culture
where people do not generally work between midnight and one and are
normally clothed rather than unclothed. They incorporate elements only
possible for a being who participates in social life and only intelligible to
somebody familiar with that particular society. It is perhaps in virtue
of this rather than in virtue of any attempt at communication by the patient
that we can describe the rituals as signs rather than symptoms. These
rituals distort accepted forms of social behaviour and the form the distor-
tion takes reveals the nature of the patient's problems.
The analyst endeavouring to make sense of these patterns of behaviour
is in some ways like the reader endeavouring to make sense of a work of
fiction. In both cases one is faced with a product which, one assumes,
reflects certain characteristics of the agent. The behaviour is revealing
of the patient's mental state; the novel reveals something about the
intentions, sympathies and ideas of the author. More pertinently, both
may contain elements which the agent could not consciously have controlled.
The complexity of inter-relations in a great work of art goes well beyond
what the author or composer could have foreseen and it is partly as a
result of this that we feel entitled to assume that every element has some
sort of role to play in the total effect of the story. In the same way Freud
assumed that no element in a dream or a fantasy was without significance,
a presupposition that Rieff plausibly relates to the critical assumption
of density in works of art as well as justifying the astonishing ingenuity
that Freud brings to the interpretation of dreams and parapraxes.7

7 Philip Rieff, Freud: the Mind of the Moralist

(Methuen, I965), I22.

489
R. A. Sharpe

Confirmation of this is to be found in the insouciance with which Freud

interpreted fictional as well as genuine dreams, and the role played by the
analysis of fantasies such as screen memories in his patients. It is noteworthy
that as early as the eighteen-nineties Freud observed to Breuer that their
studies lacked the 'serious stamp of science' and sounded more like
fiction.8
Thirdly, such interpretations do not necessarily hold for other similar
objects. A satisfactory scientific explanation explains, mutatis mutandis,
like events and theories; therefore of necessity a scientific explanation is
generalizable and provides a key elsewhere. And although the interpreta-
tion of an action or of a work of art may depend upon our drawing on our
interpretation of other events, it may not necessarily provide the interpreta-
tion of quite similar actions or objects. The understanding of a work and of
a copy or pastiche of it may require quite different considerations. Consider,
for instance, the way that Vermeer's paintings are an expression of their
time whereas van Meegeren's forgeries are not.
As against this interpretation of Freud, it is noticeable that the form
of mature Freudian explanation does in fact mirror one important, indeed
paradigmatic form of scientific explanation; it is, in a phrase, a 'hidden
mechanism' type of explanation. Overt behaviour which is difficult to
understand is accounted for by the machinations of various sub-agents
in the psyche rather as the observable symptoms of a disease are explained
by the activities of bacilli at the microscopic level or as the Brownian
motion is explained in terms of molecular movements. Having relinquished
one form of scientism, Freud has embraced another. If physiological
determinism is a sleeping partner at least in the explanations of human
behaviour required in therapeutic contexts, the form of those explanations
mirrors the way in which many phenomena studied in the sciences are
explained. This has an important bearing on the next stage of my argument.

II

One central problem is in what sense, and for what agent, neurotic rituals
are actions. In the passage quoted Stewart clearly regards the rituals as
actions he performed and equally clearly regards them as something he
was unable to avoid. Equally Freud is prepared to describe dreaming
as involving an action on the part of some agent even though we cannot
regard ourselves as responsible for what we dream or indeed dreaming
as something we do (in any straightforward way). His use of terms like

8 For a general discussion of psycho-analysis,science and the arts see Rieff,

passim.

490
 Freud and the Freedom of the Sane

'dream work' focus our attention on the way in which the censor is acting
to modify the form the dream takes. Freud viewed adult dreams as fre-
quently incorporating wishes whose nature was too shocking to be admitted
en plein; they therefore had to be disguised in order to surface in the
half-conscious world of the dream without being vetoed by the censor.
In view of the lack of freedom which the neurotic displays, we might be
tempted to regard what goes on as the effect of some neurological causes,
the whole to be understood in terms of some physiologically determinist
narrative. But although Freud is committed to determinism, his deter-
minism is of no help in this particular case. We still need, even upon the
assumption that all human action is determined, to distinguish between
those which are apparently free and those which are apparently unfree.
The very universality of the physiological account renders it useless as a
specific tool for understanding the unfreedom of the neurotic. And, of
course, apart from its failure to explain neurotic behaviour, there are
general difficulties attached to determinism, not least for the psychologist
propounding a new theory.
Indeed Freud himself, when not openly advocating his determinism,
often does not speak in causal terms. Apart from the references I gave
earlier there is an otherwise puzzling remark as early as the Studies in
Hysteria9 where he speaks of there being a rational connection between
trauma and symptom. This commits him very strongly to the thesis that
the form of explanation appropriate to neurotic illness is in terms of
reasons, motives, intentions, etc. I do not wish to discuss in detail the
extent to which this relation could be described as rational. On the face
of it the claim is absurd since what distinguishes neurotic rituals is precisely
the opposite, their irrationality. According to Freud, the rat man's ritual
was designed simultaneously to affront and placate his father; but how
could this be possible when his father had been dead for nine years?
On the other hand if we view this as a form of perverse or distorted ration-
ality and contrast it with a cause-effect relationship in which the question
of rationality or irrationality cannot even arise then we can perhaps
better appreciate Freud's contention as being a form of category claim.
And then its incompatibility with the cause-effect form of explanation
which his avowed determinism might seem to favour becomes more
visible.
A Freudian account which simultaneously recognizes the loss of freedom
of the neurotic whilst avoiding a standardly causal explanation of a neuro-
logical variety can, however, be given. Freud does not give any very
explicit or lengthy account of the loss of freedom suffered by the neurotic.
Indeed only in one case study have I been able to find so much as a hint
that the account I shall propose is the one he would have held:

9 Pelican Freud Library,3, 380-381.

49I
R. A. Sharpe

The content of his phobia was such as to impose a very great measure
of restriction upon his freedom of movement, and that was its purpose.10
The explanation is that the agent is restricted by the activities of sub-
agents within the person, i.e. the super-ego and id. This could never
be explained in terms of the activity or suppression of physiological
impulses by other physiological features, because then the element of agency
would be irretrievably lost. The id, for Freud, is not governed by the
Reality principle as the ego is but by the Pleasure principle. It pursues its own
instinctual ends."l But we can recognize the id as an agent without attributing
to it powers of ratiocination simply by regardingit much as we regardanimals
as agents. Indeed Freud's use of the Platonic metaphor of horse and rider in
describing man as having an animal and a rational nature seems to me very
appropriate. The model then is that the unfree neurotic is unfree in the way
that a man whose behaviour is constrained by other agents is unfree.
This then is the general picture Freud offers of the commonwealth
of the mind. As he says, it is 'no peaceful... self-contained unity. It is rather
to be compared to a modern State in which a mob, eager for enjoyment
and destruction, has to be held down forcibly by a prudent superior
class.'12 It would be possible, of course, to leave the argument here. This is
the theory of mind behind Freud's account of psycho-analysis and this
is how it can provide an account of the unfreedom of the mentally ill.
But I shall defend the theory of multiple agency within the personality
against some objections before I raise some difficulties of my own.
Philosophers like Thalberg,13 who object to the notion of mini-agents
or homunculi operating within the person, have to find an alternative
account, not just for the phenomena studied by Freud, but for such less
theory-laden and commonplace observations as that of the compulsive
gambler or drinker who is not in total command of his behaviour. In
these cases, the agent admits both that he has done whatever it is that he has
done and also both avers that he cannot help doing it and that in some
respects he wanted to do it. The phenomenology of the situation is that
he feels he cannot avoid doing what he is doing and yet that he admits
that he has done it. An alternative account to the Freudian theory I have
offered might be that all such actions are simply to be explained in terms of
an inconsistency between the agent's behaviour and his professed standards.
Perhaps this is Thalberg's way out. However, there remains a difference
between the man who says that he believes in moderate drinking only

10CollectedPapers,3, 280.
11There are many discussionsof this in Freud. See, for example, Inhibitions,
Symptoms and Anxiety (1936).
12
Rieff, ibid., 59.
13 'Freud'sAnatomiesof the Self', in CriticalEssaysonFreud,R. Wollheim(ed.)
(Doubleday Anchor, 1974).

492
 Freud and the Freedom of the Sane

and then inconsistently abandons his principles with no more ado when
he reaches the bar and the man who, fighting with himself, nevertheless
succumbs to the temptation and drinks himself insensate. In this last
case it is, I argue, a natural explanation that the agent is not in control
of certain sub-agents within him. As I have observed, we do not need
to assume that the sub-agent is conscious of what it attempts to achieve.
With Kenny I believe that both animals and human beings can be agents
whilst unconscious of the exact nature of their acts.14
Suppose, now, that someone was to argue that a person who produces com-
pulsive or obsessional behaviour was not acting any more than a man
pushed over a cliff acts, what should one say? The answer is to point to
the fact that the agent, whilst claiming that he cannot avoid doing these
things, still avows that they are his actions. Do we wish to say that he
is mistaken in claiming agency? Certainly, an agent could be mistaken
about his responsibility. The obvious case is post-hypnotic suggestions.
Nevertheless, even in these cases we are prepared to say that the agent did
the action even though he was not responsible for it and we say exactly
the same about the victim of a neurosis. The criteria for agency incorporate
the recognition both of the origination of movements by an individual
body and of their purposiveness. So I cannot see any general reason to
deny that the neurotic acts in carrying through these compulsive rituals.
The man who is overcome by lust or the man who is forced to cross
himself when he sees three horse droppings is impelled by the agents
within him to do so. The Freudian theory claims that the agents act in
combination so that neurotic behaviour represents the outcome of a
struggle in which no agent is entirely victorious. Theodore Mischel
seeks to explain obsessional behaviour, not in terms of homunculi but
in terms of self-deception. He argues that obsessional behaviour is one
end of a continuum whose other pole is occupied by self-deception:
When Freud says that in an obsessional neurosis 'the actual wording
of the aggressive impulse is altogether unknown to the ego. . [but]
the super-ego behaves... as though it knew the real wording' (ibid.,
p. 117), his point may be, not that we are to conceptualize the person
in terms of homunculi, but that the neurotic has avoided the conflict
by deceiving himself: his lack of awareness is motivated, he has made
himself unconscious of an incompatible impulse which he knows,
in one sense of that term, to be his. And he can do that only in so far
as he can also keep himself unconscious of the technique he is intentionally
using to deceive himself.15
But the differences between the compulsive neurotic and the self-deceiver
are marked and very important. The self-deceiver's actions are by no
14 Will, Freedomand Power, Ch. IV (Blackwell, I975).
15 Ibid., 235.

493
R. A. Sharpe

means necessarily irrational per se. They may be irrational in that they
flow from beliefs which are irrational. Thus a man whose son is an em-
bezzler but who cannot bring himself to face the facts, may irrationally
entrust his son with his company's funds. Once granted his irrational
refusal to recognize that his son is untrustworthy, there is nothing irrational
in his subsequent behaviour. It is only irrational in the light of the
irrationality of his belief and its irrationality is parasitic upon that. But
Paul Lorenz's behaviour was different in that it had no point; furthermore,
its pointlessness was obvious to Lorenz himself, as well as to others.
His behaviour could not be seen as being a means to any end he avowed.
His nightly ritual of opening the door and then exposing himself in the
mirror could only be given some sense by a psycho-analytic explanation.
So the difference between the self-deceiver and the compulsive neurotic
is the difference between the irrationality of belief and the irrationality
of action; furthermore, the crucial point as far as the topic of this paper
is concerned is that the self-deceiver is by no means unfree: he is not
forced to believe what he does nor to behave as he does; the unfreedom of
the neurotic cannot be accounted for by reference to self-deception.
In the case of phobias and compulsive behaviour the actions indicate
beliefs which the agent rejects; in the case of the self-deceiver his actions
point to beliefs which we know he has grounds for rejecting but never-
theless still holds. I conclude that self-deception and neurotic behaviour
are not alike.
Self-deception does play a part in the metapsychology of late Freud.
Disavowal (verleugnen)is his term for the refusal of small boys to admit,
in the face of observation, that little girls lack a penis. And, of course,
rationalization is itself a form of self-deception. We may generate an 'end'
which conveniently explains our behaviour or claim to be acting from
motives other than those which actually generated our behaviour; whilst
this is not invariably self-deception, sometimes it may be; it depends
upon the extent to which the agent is suppressing an inkling that his or
her behaviour may be described in other and less flattering terms. In the
Introductory Lectures he makes a reference to the Socratic doctrine:
'a neurosis would seem to be the result of a kind of ignorance-a not-
knowing about mental events that one might know of'.

III

I am unfree if I am acting under threat to my person as well as if I am

physically constrained. The bank manager who is forced to hand over the
keys to his bank by a robber who holds a pistol to his head is generally
recognized not to be acting freely, though he is acting. But if the keys are
snatched from him, then, of course, he has not acted any more than a man

494
 Freud and the Freedom of the Sane

who is thrown over a cliff acts. Actions which are unfree because they are
under duress are such that the consequences of doing otherwise are so
grave that no rational person could be expected to do other than behave
as he does. Now which of these two models do I have in mind when I
describe Freud as regarding the neurotic person as unfree? Well certainly
it would be a mistake to regard the individual as deciding upon a form of
compulsive or obsessional behaviour because the consequences of any
alternative would be particularly unpleasant. Neurotic behaviour may be
the alternative to some more catastrophic breakdown but it is implausible
to suppose that the individual decides between the two and that the choice
is rational. The examples I quoted at the outset showed that the individual
felt unable to act otherwise. In some sense or other he felt that his essential
self was not an agent. The model must then be that of physical constraint.
It is only in the broad sense of 'self' that the self can be said to be the
agent of the neurotic behaviour.
If this picture is correct it leads us to ask which of the various agents
Freud recognizes in the human psyche is having his freedom curtailed.
Is it the ego, the super-ego or the id? Freud would, I believe, have replied
that it is the ego. He explicitly claimed on one occasion that it is the ego
which is neurotic. It is by therapy that the beleaguered ego can overcome
the recalcitrant id. It is an 'instrument to enable the ego to push its conquest
of the id still further'.16 The ego is caught between the implacable claims
of conscience embodied in the super-ego and the demands of the instincts
which have to be satisfied. In the healthy individual, reason, in the form
of the ego, adjudicates either by siding with the super-ego, buttressing it
and thereby strengthening the moral inhibitions, or else by relaxing them
so as to reduce conflict. The inference we draw is that the ego represents
the true 'I' and it is this 'I' to which the neurotic refers when he says
of himself that he cannot act. Whereas the id represents our common
humanity, it is the ego which first enshrines individuality. The term 'ego'
translated the German 'ich' and there is some indication that the standard
English translation of this word did not please Freud. Thus the essential
or 'thin' conception of the 'I' is identified with the ego. It is the ego to
which the therapist addresses himself. His concern is for the ego and not
for the id. The id, in contrast, has no concepts and can form no objects
of its desires: any apparent cunning in the ways in which it tries to cir-
cumvent the ego, through dreams or devious behaviour, is to be explained
in terms of the fact that a straightforward onslaught is doomed to failure.
However, the id remains an agent. It is purposeful; there is a teleological
element in its pressure upon the ego and in the broad sense of 'I' the self
acts in performing the neurotic rituals even if the essential I, the ego, is
the unwilling victim of these forces.

16 See Rieff, ibid., 58-64.

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We may recall Freud's own mechanistic analogy here. But the fact
that the energy of the id takes the route available to it does not imply that
the id is not an agent. In some of his early work Freud speaks in mechanistic
terms, though, to be fair, it is not clear how much force should be attached
to the analogy. In one respect however the analogy is required. It is
implausible, as we have seen, to suppose that in sickness the ego is acting
under duress. The ego no more acts than the man acts who is flung about
bodily by external forces. So the sense in which the ego is unfree is not
the sense in which our bank manager is unfree when he acts under threat
but unfree in the sense in which a person who is bodily moved by other
agents is unfree. But the intelligibility of this conception is by no means
clear, and in examining it we focus upon a deep incoherence in the Freudian
account. We have the notion of a person acted upon by external forces and
unfree in that way (as opposed to being unfree in acting under duress)
because we can see that person as a physical lump of matter subject to
the laws and forces of the physical world. But the ego is not a lump of
matter, so how can it be unfree in the same manner? All Freud offers are
uncashed metaphors such as 'channelling'.17 To understand the loss of
freedom involved we revert to understanding the processes in terms of
physical movements and physical constraint. We are therefore thrown
back upon the model of the early Project; if we conceive of the ego as
corresponding to a part of the brain which is determined by events in
those other parts of the brain which correspond to the super-ego or id then
we have the glimmerings of an intelligible thesis.
But, as I pointed out earlier, there is no way in which such a theory
can account specifically for the loss of freedom of the neurotic whilst
leaving the behaviour of the healthy and sane individual undetermined
by physical causes. The model is a blunderbuss. The conclusion must be
that a Freudian account is basically and irremediably flawed. Determinist
or compatibilist, a Freudian has to make somewhere a distinction between
those actions which are, at least apparently, free, and those which are,
at least apparently, unfree. Freud's mature theory of personality structure
can offer no answers.18

Saint David's University College, Lampeter

17 ThreeEssayson Sexuality, Pelican Freud Library,7, 85.

18An earlier draft, which was read at a University of Wales staff-student
colloquiumat GregynogHall in 1977,was also readby ProfessorPeterAlexander,
for whose comments I am grateful.

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