Preface to Epistemological Foundations of the Free Society: Ayn Rand's Theory of Universals Applied to Science, Sigmund Freud's Psychology, and Ludwig von Mises's Economics (available July 1 in print and ebook forms at Amazon.com and others)

A sound theory of universals is fundamental to the defense of a free society.

 

    Plato said that universals, which he called forms, are located in another dimension of reality and only certain people can know them. Hence, his advocacy of a near-communistic society of philosopher-kings who would rule. Thomas Hobbes advocated a theory called nominalism, which says universals are conventional, arbitrary names, not sound or objective concepts that are true. This made him a relativist in ethics and advocate of a strong “public sword,” or monarchy, to keep the peace in society.

 

   Karl Marx did not have a theory of universals, though we might say it was implied in what Ludwig von Mises calls Marx’s polylogism, a theory of many logics that rejects the notion of only one fundamental logic based on Aristotle’s three laws. Thus, Marx claimed that the bourgeoisie have their logic, while the proletariat have theirs, which means the two classes cannot talk to or understand each other. Hence, his advocacy of the  dictatorship of the proletariat to establish that Garden of Eden called communism—or socialism—he considered both terms synonymous. Today’s postmodern Marxists say something similar: “You have your truth; I have my truth.” As consequence, what they advocate in political philosophy is a repressive society, with the so-called victim classes taking the place of the proletariat.

 

   Underlying any theory of political philosophy is a theory of human nature, also called philosophical psychology. A sound theory of universals is required to form and define the concepts that identify and define the essentials of human nature. Do human beings possess the capacity to reason, the word “capacity” meaning we do not reason automatically but must choose to exercise that capacity, which means we have an active consciousness with which we control our lives? Or are we determined by genes and environment with illusions of consciousness and free will? The illusion of consciousness is called materialism and the illusion of free will is called determinism. Both are advocated by Hobbes and Marx. If we do possess a volitional consciousness, however, the idea of a free society—capitalism—follows from basic concepts of rights, freedom, the moral validity of the pursuit of self-interest, and, in particular, a sound theory of universals that explains how objectivity and truth are possible.

    The significance of a correct theory of universals is that our knowledge, with the exception of proper names, is entirely in the form of universal concepts. If those concepts are not valid, they mean nothing when we move from epistemology to ethics and politics, and to all the special sciences, including psychology and economics. That is, we must be able to use and apply the theory of universals to validate science, especially our concept of human nature—to establish the foundations of psychology, to validate the concept of value to establish a theory of ethics, and to validate many other concepts to define the proper function of government. This last includes rights and freedom, along with such additional concepts as the nature and meaning of healthy and unhealthy motivation and behavior and the production of wealth in a social setting.

    A correct theory of universals means our minds are competent to know reality and thus can guide us in our choices and actions to grow, thrive, and prosper.

    Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts, which I will argue is a sound theory of universals, is her most important and significant contribution to philosophy, especially to epistemology. Only by making the theory widely known and understood can the free society be properly defended.

    The present work is not a defense of capitalism per se. Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises provide unanswerable moral and economic justifications.[1] The subject of this book is epistemology and its importance in identifying the nature of science, basic and applied, with emphasis on the human sciences of psychology and economics. Its theme is that the essence of science is observation, not exact measurement, and that science employs as its primary and fundamental method the mental process of conceptualization: generalization from observation of particulars to identify universals, then application of previously formed universals to understand new particular cases. The issue of universals, based on Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts, runs throughout, providing the fundamental epistemological foundation for proper defenses of reason in philosophy, individualism in psychology, and capitalism in economics.

    My audience, as a result, is laypersons and academics interested in the underlying epistemology of science, especially the human sciences that, when integrated with psychology and economics, provide the ultimate vindication of a free society and answer to such ill-founded theories as those of Plato, Hobbes, and Marx.

    In chapter 1, using Rand’s theory of universals, or concepts as she calls them, I introduce her notion of measurement omission as the essence of abstraction to address the proper meanings of, and distinctions between, basic and applied science, theory and history, and the cognitive processes of generalization and application. Positivism—logical positivism or logical empiricism, as it is also labeled—and experimentation are discussed, followed by a presentation of what is called the problem of universals.

    In chapter 2, I elaborate Rand’s theory of concepts as an improvement on Aristotle’s theory of form and matter by identifying concepts and essences as neither intrinsic, in the thing, as Aristotle taught, nor subjective as the nominalists assert. Rather, concepts and essences are epistemological, in our minds, created by us and are valid and epistemologically objective if they correctly identify the metaphysical referents on which they are based. I further discuss Rand’s important explanations of abstraction from abstractions and concepts of consciousness. In concluding the chapter, I elaborate Rand’s usage of the terms “metaphysical” and “epistemological,” ending with a presentation of what I consider her radical theory of logic as non-contradictory identification.

    In chapter 3, I discuss several related philosophical issues using Rand’s theory to refute the bane of science, positivism, and to provide valid empirically-based explanations of Immanuel Kant’s allegedly innate “a priori” concepts—space, time, and causality—as well as a non-religious, non-Kantian empirical defense of free will. I continue with a discussion of the distinction between general knowledge, which we all possess to some degree and with some accuracy, and personal knowledge, which is unique to our own experiences. Finally, I conclude with a brief discussion of the role and importance of emotion in both science and our personal lives.

    In chapters 4 and 5, respectively, I apply Rand’s theory to my understanding of psychology and economics as human sciences, with emphasis on the work of Sigmund Freud and Ludwig von Mises. Both Freud and Mises have been criticized as pseudo- or non-scientific for using “literary” (Freud) or “non-quantitative” (Mises) methods to establish their theories. To the contrary, I argue that the methods of both are models of conceptualization, which I contend is the fundamental method of science.

    I became aware of the importance of conceptualization in science when I reread Edith Packer’s Lectures on Psychology after they had been made available as a Kindle book, in 2013, by her husband George Reisman. I realized after reading the book that conceptualization was what Dr. Packer was doing as a psychotherapist, and then realized that Mises, Dr. Reisman, Aristotle, and, when reading him later, Freud, were doing the same thing in their work. Masses of quantitative data and laboratory experiments, I realized, were not the essence of science.

    In chapter 6, I conclude the work with a summary of its thesis, elaborating on what I call thinking in definitions and clarifying the meanings of scientific law and principle. Finally, statements about Kant’s legacy and, subsequently, Ayn Rand’s complete the book.

    The significance of focusing on Freud and Mises is that they both provide fundamental concepts and principles for the foundation of a free society, Freud for the individual to pursue a healthy, happy, and psychologically independent life and Mises for individuals to cooperate with each other to achieve peace and prosperity. Both are experts on human nature, explicitly so for Freud, implicitly for Mises, and both, despite the comments of their critics, consider themselves to be scientists. This work aims to provide Freud and Mises a needed epistemological foundation.

    The meaning of free society that I am using is Ayn Rand’s concept of laissez-faire capitalism as a social system, presupposing an ethics of rational self-interest. That is, capitalism is not just the private ownership of the means of production, as economists, Mises in particular, define it, but a system based on the primacy of individual rights, especially property rights, with all property privately owned, allowing social cooperation to be achieved by voluntarily trading value for value. Rights are freedoms of action—deriving from human nature as a rational being—to speak and write openly and to work with others to pursue property, careers, relationships, hobbies, education, and happiness without the interference of initiated physical coercion, that is, physical force, by the government or criminals. Self-defensive coercion is delegated to the government unless involved in an emergency situation.

    The importance of defining capitalism as a social system is that it broadens the concept beyond economics alone. This is significant because totalitarian states are called such because they seek to and often do—in the name of an ethics of self-sacrifice—control every aspect of the individuals’ lives, not just their economic lives.[2] Totalitarianism means total control. Capitalism means total freedom—from direct or indirect initiated physical force of any type, economic or political.

    A further point about the meaning of Rand’s concept of capitalism. It is not what we have today or had in the late nineteenth century, though Rand acknowledges the United States came close in those earlier years. Her concept is a goal, a moral and political ideal, to work toward to achieve at some point in the future. It is not Marx’s utopia or creation of a “new man,” as Marx said communism would give us. Capitalism requires hard work and self-responsibility with no one expected to provide handouts. The problems with the apparent capitalism that we had in earlier days, and have today, is that many big businesses and governments have colluded with each other to gain favors and wealth for themselves, ignoring everyone else. This is not capitalism, but corporatism or, more precisely, fascism.

    For this reason, one of the best ways to describe capitalism is that it is a system in which business and state are completely separated in the same way and for the same reasons as we now have the (nearly) complete separation of church and state. And by “business,” I mean any organization that operates to earn a profit by offering value to paying customers. I include schools, roads, and utilities, today’s publicly owned and mixed institutions. I also believe that there should be no so-called nonprofit organizations. All societal institutions, business, church, or otherwise, should be privately owned and operated and expected to earn an excess of revenues or donations over expenses. If there is to be taxation to support the considerably limited government, it should be a flat tax applied to everyone, including to those so-called nonprofits. As Ayn Rand indicates, there are other options in financing government in a free society, but the issue is far removed from today’s problems. For the most part, it should be postponed for debate until we come closer to a truly free society.

    I did not come up with the theme of this book until recently, but the idea behind it was implanted in me during the spring quarter of my freshman year, 1966, at the University of Denver. I took the course “Modern Philosophy,” taught by Leonard Peikoff. The course covered Thomas Hobbes, the Continental rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz), the British empiricists (Locke, Berkeley, Hume), and Immanuel Kant—in ten weeks.[3] The issue of universals and political philosophy arose immediately because Dr. Peikoff’s lectures began with Hobbes and the consequences of Hobbes’s nominalism. The issue continued throughout the course, at least indirectly, when we came to John Locke’s inability to find a “something I know not what,” Hume’s failure to find a necessary connection between cause and effect, and, of course, Kant’s failure to find reality.

    An important note here is that Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts did not begin to be published until July of that year, and Dr. Peikoff’s teaching style was to present the best case he could for a viewpoint he did not accept, even bending over backwards to make it sound like he supported it. He knew Ayn Rand’s theory at this time but did not present it in the course.[4] Lively Q&A’s went on throughout the term, but no solution to the problem of universals was found. I concluded, reluctantly, that those of us most interested in the topic were left on the floor, desperately trying to find Aristotle’s intrinsic essences. After that quarter, Dr. Peikoff returned to New York City where he had lived for many years.

    When Ayn Rand’s theory was published, I memorized key definitions to think about them, for example, when waiting for my next class.[5] In the ensuing years, my interest in epistemology and the problem of universals never waned. It was a treat to read the discussions of epistemology by Ludwig von Mises and, though not exactly a treat, my knowledge of epistemology helped me in graduate school to fend off the assaults of that god called positivism.

 

     My relationship to Ayn Rand’s philosophy, which she named Objectivism, is that I am a follower of her philosophy, but do not describe myself as an Objectivist. I call myself a student of Ayn Rand, in the same way I call myself a student of Sigmund Freud and Ludwig von Mises. In 1968, in the aftermath of Rand’s break with Nathaniel Branden, she emphasized that Objectivism was her philosophy and that followers should take care not to speak for her, but to continue working as independent intellectuals in their own fields applying her ideas as relevant.[6] This is how I have viewed my scholarly work for many decades. In the present book, I emphasize that I am presenting and applying her ideas as I understand them. Elaborations and applications are mine.[7]

    My thirty-six-year academic career was spent in the applied science of business marketing, teaching and writing about fundamental ideas—Ayn Rand’s, as well as those of psychologists and economists—applying them to the business disciplines and education.

     The many references used in this book indicate a wide variety of influences on my thinking and writing. I endorse some, reject others or attempt to refute them, and some are neutral, providing important information as background and history. Aside from Ayn Rand, Freud, and Mises, my most significant influences are psychologist Edith Packer and economist George Reisman. My primary and permanent influence is my wife, soulmate, and editor, philosopher Linda Reardan. Her conceptions both of post-Kantian, modern Aristotelianism and of emotions as data for reasoning have influenced this book. Our daughter, a mechanical engineer, has also been helpful when challenging me to explain to her, in simple terms, the thesis of the work.

     The formatting, as with all my books, follows The Chicago Manual of Style, though not completely. I still prefer superscript numbers in the footnote reference, for example, as opposed to Chicago’s recommendation to use full-sized numbers followed by a period. Clarity and consistency are the criteria of formatting, which I learned from Carol Fisher Saller, The Subversive Copy Editor.

 

     For references to the internet, I have shortened most of the uniform resource locators (URLs) to their domain names. When searching for my reference, I recommend using what is called the “site operator,” for example, site:freud.org.uk private meaning or site:mises.org economic calculation. This will almost always, at the top of the search, return the words that follow the domain name. Digital object identifiers (DOIs), unique locators usually of academic journal articles, have not been shortened. Citations to print publications have been shortened after the initial reference. All sources are listed in the bibliography in full, including uniform resource locators.

 

   A final note on “self-plagiarism,” a term I believe to be a ludicrous contradiction in terms that has gained some notoriety in the academic world. I emphatically do not endorse the notion that a writer can plagiarize him- or herself, especially when acknowledgment is made about the so-called recycling of one’s own work. For the record, I have been writing and posting monthly blogs for nineteen years and more than twenty of the posts, since 2021, were written as drafts for eventual use, after editing, in the present work. A few excerpts from the draft of this work have also been posted as blogs.[8]

   Notes    

 

   [1] I must add George Reisman and his magnum opus Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. Reisman is a follower of Ayn Rand’s philosophy and former student of Mises.

 

    [2] The ethics, especially today, is usually a variant of Kant’s duty-over-inclination maxim, imposed at the point of a government gun (or Hobbes’s public sword). The individual’s life belongs to the state and must be sacrificed to it when and as requested. 

 

    [3] The quarter system at the time was ten weeks plus a week of finals, and classes were five days a week, fifty minutes each. I took Professor Peikoff’s introductory philosophy course during the previous winter quarter, along with 160 of my closest classmates. The modern philosophy class consisted of about thirty-five students.

 

    [4]    In the introduction to philosophy course, Dr. Peikoff had nearly everyone convinced he was a determinist. In the modern philosophy course, I knew that he knew Ayn Rand’s theory because he taught it in a graduate seminar during the fall quarter of 1965. I even had the audacity to walk into his office, before attending a single college class, to ask him if I could audit his graduate seminar. He said “no,” because it would not be fair to others. He did, however, give me the telephone number of the local representative of the Nathaniel Branden Institute that presented lecture courses on tape of Ayn Rand’s philosophy.

 

    [5]    Rand’s theory of concepts was initially published in eight monthly installments in The Objectivist magazine from July 1966 to February 1967. One of the (non-epistemological) definitions I memorized was her notion of capitalism as a social system. When I mentioned it to a classmate, the classmate was surprised, and I was surprised that he was surprised—because I had assumed that Rand’s definition was self-evident and that everyone must have known it! 

 

    [6] Ayn Rand, “A Statement of Policy,” The Objectivist 7, no. 6 (June 1968): 7–9. 

 

    [7]    In the present work, I have concentrated on avoiding any tinges of moralism, a trait that unfortunately is sometimes present in Rand’s writing and in the demeanor of some of her followers. See my discussion of the anti-conceptual mentality in Jerry Kirkpatrick, Independent Judgment and Introspection: Fundamental Requirements of the Free Society (Kirkpatrick Books, 2019), 108–110, and below, chap. 3, the section titled “Defensive Habits and Free Will,” pp. 67–69.

 

    [8] See jerrykirkpatrick.blogspot.com for the blogs. I have always considered my blog posts to be drafts of whatever I might later publish. See Richard Posner, The Little Book of Plagiarism (Pantheon, 2007), for his discussion of the legal and moral issues involved in plagiarism and “self-plagiarism.” The term “self-plagiarism” likely applies more correctly to students who turn in the same paper for two different classes. 

On the Nature of Human Nature

Theories of human nature underly theories of political and economic systems.
 
Some people attempt to justify capitalism with the Calvinist theory that says, because of Original Sin, the inherent tendency to evil, we should do our duty by working hard to absolve those sins and ensure acceptance into Heaven. This is the gist of the Protestant Ethic. 
 
Others attack capitalism by saying it assumes an inherent goodness in human beings, at which point they cry hypocrisy and list all the evil that goes on in the world.
 
Sigmund Freud’s theory of human nature is more sophisticated, albeit based on determinism. It says we have two fundamental drives, analogous to hunger or sex, that determine our behavior, namely the life or positive self-assertion drive and the death or destruction drive. The latter gives some of us a strongly aggressive personality that culture—civilization—must control. Hence, our “discontent” that results from living in civilization.
 
The theory of human nature best representing a free society holds that human beings possess free will, are self-responsible, and possess the ability, if they so choose to exert the effort, to raise themselves up from their original stations in life, that is, for example, to achieve and enjoy a higher standard of living than that of their parents.*
 
The theory does not describe human beings as inherently evil or inherently good, or as helpless victims of genes and environment—those theories deny free will.
 
Freedom of the will means that a person’s choices are the essential source of both good and evil, though culture—the environment we were reared in, especially family and education—are also important sources of our thoughts and behaviors. (See my post “On the Nature of Evil.”)
 
This free-will theory is sometimes said to be neutral, meaning we are born neither good nor evil. We have the equal potential for both. Nevertheless, we can challenge this complete neutrality by considering whether humans by nature have a stronger tendency to do good than to do evil. How so?
 
Just as the human body has a tendency to heal itself, so also does the human consciousness.
 
A minor cut on the finger or hand, for example, in most people clots and heals itself in a few days. The tendency to heal ourselves psychologically derives from the biological function of consciousness to use reason to perceive our selves and environment correctly, then choose values and take actions necessary to sustain and enhance our lives.
 
This tendency to goodness can be called, with qualifications, the will to do the right thing. We see this desire in children from their earliest years, depending on parental influence, eagerly seeking to live their lives in a healthy and happy way, and often continuing through adolescence and adulthood even after being confronted with major unpleasant environmental obstacles.
 
This will gives most people in a civilized society a benevolent intention in their lives and slants the theory of human nature more toward an inherent goodness.
 
What precisely do I mean by “the will to do the right thing”? Fundamentally, it is a psychological requirement for our consciousness to function. We have a need to feel right before taking an action. Does this mean we are always right? No. It is a theory based on free will, which means we can make mistakes or do evil things.
 
Psychologically, however, we must believe that we are right each time we select what to do; it is a perception of being right. Otherwise, we will not be able to act.
 
This perception of rightness, that I am calling the will to do the right thing, is analogous to the psychological concept of perceived risk. Just as risk perception varies from person to person, so also does “rightness” vary from person to person. **
 
“Being right” applies to everyone, both good and evil, with a continuum of “rightness” and multiple meanings of the word. Let us now look at some examples along that continuum.
 
The most common usage of the concept “right,” when talking about “doing the right thing,” means doing the morally right thing. It means especially being honest in thought, communication with others, and action. Most people, I submit, at least in American culture, do strive to be honest, so this statement probably can be applied to most Americans.
 
The “right thing,” however, within the science of ethics depends on the moral theory and standard of value one is assuming, though it usually means what we were taught as children.
 
A significant influence on American culture is the ethics of Immanuel Kant, who insists that telling the truth is an unconditional principle that is consistent with his categorical imperative of always acting in accordance with duty, never from inclination. This means it is one’s unconditional duty to tell the truth to a homicidal maniac who comes to your door looking for his or her victim. Kant says there is a difference between doing what is right versus what avoids harm to another person. Telling the truth in this situation is not wrong.
 
Ayn Rand, however, disagrees with Kant and says that both physical and moral principles can and do have qualifications. The statement that water boils at 212º Fahrenheit is not the end of the story. The qualification, varying by air pressure and purity of water, must be added.
 
Similarly, telling the truth does not mean qualifications or consequences be damned (as Kant’s theory says). Honesty means telling the truth unless confronted by direct or indirect initiated coercion, threatened with invasion of privacy, or when a blunt truth might be unnecessarily hurtful to another person.
 
Thus, doing the right thing varies by underlying moral theory, but most people today, I would add (again, in our present culture), are uncomfortable with the strict Kantian ethics of duty over inclination and to a great extent with the concept of Original Sin.
 
Hence, as I continue to say, most people try to do the right thing, however they may understand it, at least on a practical level. None probably have ever had a homicidal maniac come to their door and many likely have fibbed to avoid unduly hurting a friend or relative.
 
My father, for example, seems to have been a good Kantian in ethics, though I am certain he had never heard of Immanuel Kant. He said to me once, “You do your work because it is your duty, not because you enjoy it.” He was raised Protestant on a farm and worked most of his life as a clerk in the post office. His intentions and honesty were decidedly right—and I do think he enjoyed his work.
 
Some people with psychological problems may, to an outside observer, appear not to be honest. Usually, however, such problems are not moral failings.
 
Psychological problems—typically involving self-doubt and the emotion of anxiety—trigger the strong need in us to allay, reduce, or blot out that feeling by adopting defensive habits, such as withdrawal, hostility, or a compulsive behavior. Often, as children, we develop defensive symptoms subconsciously, not knowing how we got them. Nevertheless, the purpose of a defensive habit is to give us the feeling of doing right while also assuaging our anxiety.
 
The psychological need to feel right is the source of what I am calling the tendency to do the right thing—however one might define “right.”
 
The extreme example on the negative end of the continuum of “rightness” is the criminal personality. Rationalization—excuse-making to feel right—seems to be the primary defensive habit of criminals whose self-esteem is low. As one put it, “I am a nothing. If I thought about it, I would have to kill myself.” Thus, the rapist says, “She really wanted me” and the murderer says, “He deserved it.”
 
Rationalization also describes dictators, as they are criminal personalities who must believe (rationalize) they are right in every action they take. See Ayn Rand’s comment, 246, on Nikita Khrushchev’s need to justify his behavior by reciting the mantra of dialectical materialism, and my use of Rand’s comment in Applying Principles, 314, where I attempt to explain why facts don’t matter to many people, including, or especially, dictators.
 
Doing the “right thing” for the criminal is definitely not the objectively moral thing to do, nor is this statement a justification or exoneration of criminal or immoral behavior. It is a psychological observation that criminal behavior feels right to the criminal and explains his or her actions.
 
Surely, then, one might assert, there are people who knowingly do the wrong thing. Yes, as a double standard. This is the criminal personality who enjoys getting away with the forbidden. Yes, the criminal says, I know it is illegal, but that is who I am. The criminal’s identity is such that he or she feels right to rob banks, and worse. 
 
Or, as one criminal said incredulously to a psychologist, “You expect me to get a job to buy what I want when I can just go into the store and take it?” Paying for goods in a store is for suckers, he said. He believed or felt, as his rationalization, that he was doing the right thing.
 
Only suckers, according to the criminal, obey the law. What he does is right, according to his rationalization-infested mind. (See Stanton Samenow, Inside the Criminal Mind.)
 
Most people, as I continue to maintain, exhibit a will to do the morally right thing, indicating that human nature has built into it a tendency to do good, meaning most people can and do exhibit varying degrees of good intentions.
 
According to the theory of human nature presented here, I put most people on the scale of honesty and goodness.
 
Both values are required for a lasting free society.
 
 
* Psychiatrist William Glasser (chap. 1) assumed a similar theory when treating his patients. He said, “We choose our own misery. Thus, we can choose our own happiness.” His goal as therapist was to work with patients to help them choose healthier and happier behaviors.
 
** Perceived risk, also called subjective risk, means, for example, that some people need alcoholic beverages before getting on an airplane, while others like to walk on wings for a living. Risk perception exists along a continuum, which means we can now draw an analogy between epistemology where there is a difference between what we perceive or believe to be true­—and what is true, and ethics where there is a difference between what we perceive or believe to be right—and what is right. In both cases, people vary considerably according to what they believe to be true and right—and what is true and right.

The Concept of “Getting At”

When my wife, philosopher Linda Reardan, and I read a new writer whose ideas do not quite fit our established notions, we ask ourselves “what is this person getting at?” The ideas are not ridiculous, to be dismissed out of hand, nor do they strike us as correct identifications of the facts of reality. “Getting at” means these writers are attempting, in their own way and depending on their historical context, to make what they believe to be correct identifications.
 
A major error, of those who have swallowed positivist premises, is to dismiss new (or different) ideas as not “verifiable” or not “falsifiable”—terms that are red herrings from post-Kantian philosophy and especially from Karl Popper’s philosophy of science. Another error, of many who follow Ayn Rand, is to dismiss such ideas because they do not agree with her philosophy, therefore they are not worthy of further consideration.
 
For the past several months (May 2023–February 2024) I have written posts about two scholars and what they were getting at: economist Ludwig von Mises and psychologist Sigmund Freud. Despite accepting some Kantian ideas, Mises produced outstanding works based on defending the epistemological foundation of economics against the positivist premise that all science must be quantitative. In addition, I address the issue of “subjective value” in economics (see also this post) as being essentially the same concept as what Ayn Rand calls socially objective value, which means, consistent with her theory of concepts, that value is not metaphysical, in the thing. Rather, it is psychological or epistemological (both words used by her).
 
Freud, who is far more Aristotelian than Kantian even though he lived in a neo-Kantian culture, focused on reality to help distressed patients discover un- (or sub-) conscious thoughts and experiences that made them unhappy in the present and then proceeded to help them achieve happier lives. He was not a “pan-sexualist,” as critics have said of him. As a result of his accomplishments, Freud must be considered the father of modern psychology.
 
Let us now go back to Aristotle and look at one issue he was “getting at,” though many Greek philosophers could be used here as examples of the “getting at” premise, including Plato. Indeed, Aristotle was developing further the discoveries of Socrates and Plato on universals, reason, and definitions when he came up with his theory of universals known as moderate realism.* Aristotle, in contrast to Plato, believed that the universal essence or form of a thing is intrinsic or embedded in the individual thing, and we abstract it using nous—reason—to arrive at rational knowledge.
 
Aristotle’s theory today is a layperson’s common-sense epistemology that says, “We just see tableness in the tables out there in reality.” But that is not correct, as critics of the theory for centuries have shown. Essences are not out there, in the thing. Ayn Rand, aware that the mental process is more complicated than Aristotle believed, improves his theory by demonstrating that abstraction is a mental process of omitting precise measurement of the many similar tables we have observed. That is what gives us the universal. The process, she goes on to discuss, is even more complicated, requiring volitional effort to form abstractions from abstractions (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, chap. 1–3).
 
Aristotle was “getting at” the right thing, but did not quite get there.
 
Moving along chronologically, let us look at Christianity. St. Augustine, according to Professor E in the Appendix to Ayn Rand’s Epistemology (262–63), was the first in history to give us the concept of consciousness (though the Stoics anticipated it). The Greeks had identified several important processes of our minds, such as perception, imagination, emotion, and reason, but did not put them together into one concept. Augustine’s human consciousness was a reflection of the monotheistic Christian God, who, in effect, is the “giant consciousness in the sky” that causes events on earth and may or may not grant us our wishes through prayers (Independent Judgment and Introspection, 38–40). Augustine’s concept of consciousness nevertheless was a step forward.
 
Descartes, more than any of the previous religious thinkers, in a confused manner, brought the consciousness in the sky down to earth and put it in our bodies, making it personal to each one of us (likely influenced by Protestantism). He attempted to integrate mind and body as a naturalistic entity, but is remembered, though the dichotomy goes back to the Greeks, as the one who gave us mind-body dualism. Descartes’ fundamental error was to assert that consciousness is the first thing we know, not existence. This is his prior-certainty-of-consciousness premise that continues to plague philosophy today. Or, as Linda has observed, modern philosophers, ever since Descartes’ cogito (I think, therefore I am), have been stuck in their own minds trying to find a way out to reality.
 
When we get to Immanuel Kant, we do have to acknowledge that he is the first to solidify the notion that consciousness is not a mirror of nature, as critics of moderate realism say to disparage the doctrine, but has its own identity. Unfortunately, he concluded, or rationalized—philosopher Walter Kaufmann (116) describes him as a “virtuoso of rationalization”—that because consciousness has a nature we can never know true, noumenal reality, only a phenomenal world.
 
Positivism is a doctrine I resist granting anything to after getting it in spades in graduate school, but I must admit that its advocates were attempting, and still attempt to this day, to answer Kant’s conclusions and to defend science—at great expense. The expense of positivism was, and still is, to declare the following meaningless: metaphysics, universals, facts, values, and truth. The “truths” it says we can know are only those that are synthetic, that is, tied to perceptual concretes—they are not universal—and analytic “truths,” which are universal but arbitrary and say nothing about reality. The positivists’ misguided “contribution” is to require in the human sciences a distorted version of the method of the physical sciences. (See “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy” in Rand’s Epistemology, 88–121.)
 
Pragmatism, instead of being a villainous philosophy, was a doctrine of empiricism, based on the acceptance of the biological nature of consciousness and the attempt to defend knowledge and science against the attacks of the German, British and American Idealists, this last including the work of Brand Blanshard. The so-called pragmatic theory of truth, namely that truth is what works, attributed to William James, may be poorly formulated, but it is an answer to the rationalism of idealism. It insists that we must stay tied to real activities of life to know what is true. Using this theory of truth, we can say, with qualifications, that capitalism is true because it works, whereas socialism is false because it does not work. My qualifications are that a theory of truth requires more than what the pragmatists offered.
 
John Dewey, whom I read extensively when writing Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism, did not like the word “pragmatism,” preferring “instrumentalism,” in the sense that thought is the instrument of action, which means all thought and knowledge are for the sake of action, not ivory-towered speculation. I learned many things from my study of Dewey. One is to trust the original source of the author’s own words, not summaries. I read three summaries who disagreed with each other and did not sound like what I read in Dewey. After I had read many works of his, I read Dewey’s Metaphysics by Raymond Boisvert and agreed with him that Dewey not only has a metaphysics, but that it is Aristotelian and his theory of truth is a correspondence theory, though Dewey improves on Aristotle’s theory by rejecting any form of intrinsicism of essences or values.
 
For more on what I found Dewey to be “getting at,” read my post in Applying Principles, 295–99. No, Dewey does not have a theory of concepts or universals, nor is he an advocate of capitalism. I did not read his works on ethics. His metaphysics and epistemology, however, were “getting at” something. He is difficult to read, though he does sometimes use interesting business metaphors, such as, subject matter in education is the working capital of thought. His theory of education is not too different from that of Maria Montessori—and is not, I must emphasize, what many progressive educators say it is.
 
Let me conclude this post with reference to two previous posts about the Bible. The first concerns Jewish political commentator Dennis Prager’s The Ten Commandments, which, he points out, should be translated from the Hebrew as the Ten Statements. What is significant about this short book is that it is not deontological in the Kantian sense that they are ten duties. Indeed, Prager says that these ten statements have driven the development of civilization and “are the greatest list of instructions ever devised for creating a good society.” One other mistranslation, he points out, is that “do not kill” in 1610 King James English should really be “do not murder.”
 
My other post looks at Matthew 7:1–6 in the New Testament. The first verse is the “do not judge” statement that Ayn Rand has made pointedly negative comments about, though some of her followers misunderstand her interpretation of the advice. The rest of the Matthew verses relate the Golden Rule, an early statement of justice, and emphasize that we should use the same standard of value when judging others as ourselves. And that we should be careful when forming partnerships, personal or professional, lest we end up throwing our pearls to pigs who turn on us, trampling the pearls and attacking us.
 
Pretty good advice coming from the New Testament. Even the Bible was “getting at” many true things.
 
 
* In an earlier post, I referred incorrectly to Aristotle’s theory as naïve realism. The theory is occasionally denigrated as “naïve” and I seem to recall it in my undergraduate days being identified as such. But the more acceptable term today is “moderate,” or sometimes “metaphysical,” realism, meaning the essence is “out there” in the thing.

The Applied Science of Psychoanalytic Therapy

In my previous post, I discussed essential concepts of Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, that is, his basic science. This month I want to present the practice or applied science of psychoanalytic therapy.
 
Engineers presuppose fundamental concepts of physics and chemistry, along with additional concepts unique to their specialty. Subsequently they apply all of this knowledge to specific cases to build particular, concrete machines and particular, distinct bridges to enhance human life. History, the concretes of a specific case, as well as theory, the universals of the science, are both involved in the practical application of concepts to achieve a specific goal.
 
Similarly, psychoanalytic therapists take Freud’s basic concepts of psychoanalysis, along with specific knowledge of each patient’s personality, character, and history, and apply these notions to help the individual patient become more independent and happy.
 
The essence of psychoanalytic therapy, according to Freud, is the process of talk therapy with the goal of making the unconscious conscious. It means unearthing or digging deep—he often uses archeology as a metaphor for psychotherapy—in the unconscious to find repressed ideas associated with disturbing events and to encourage the patient to re-experience the original emotions. This “abreaction,” which I suggested in my October post was an early form of derepression, became less important (33-34, 219) in Freud’s later years when he began to put more emphasis on the patient’s effort of overcoming resistance to recall and talk about what was painful and repressed.
 
The treatment method of talk therapy, as I mentioned last month, was learned from Josef Breuer (30) who encouraged his patient Anna O. to reminisce about early disturbing experiences that might have led to her conversion hysteria (paralyzed arm among other psychosomatic ailments). In the process of this therapy she said jokingly that she was chimney sweeping, but more seriously described the method as the talking cure. In the early years, Breuer and Freud called this the cathartic method, a cleansing or purifying of the soul. For some years, Freud used hypnosis to overcome resistance, gradually abandoning it in favor of the talk method of finding connections to early and forgotten events, thoughts, and emotions.
 
In the last two sentences of Lecture 31 in Freud’s 1933 New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, he writes, “Where it was, there should become I. [Therapeutic effort] is a cultural achievement somewhat like the draining of the Zuyder Zee” (translation Bruno Bettelheim, 61, 62, my italics). That is, just as the Dutch reclaimed land from the sea, so also therapists help patients reclaim their conscious souls (the I) from the unconscious it.*
 
An important concept of therapy that Freud discovered by chance was transference, the idea that patients, as they improve, begin to associate the therapist with an important person from childhood, usually a parent, thus transferring their feelings about this person, both good and bad, to the therapist (An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 29-32). Often the patients feel an unconditional love (which Carl Rogers, 61-62, in later years called an “unconditional positive regard”) from the therapist that they likely did not experience from their parents. Sometimes, though, anger and hostility may be felt, depending on the type of childhood the patient experienced. And on occasion a patient of the opposite sex may fall in love with the therapist—one young female patient flung her arms around Freud’s neck, convinced that they were in love with each other, and Breuer’s patient, Anna O, at the end of her treatment persuaded herself that she was carrying his baby!
 
Once Freud identified these transference reactions, he identified their value in therapy. Once the patient realizes these feelings toward the therapist are displacements, the patient becomes more motivated to overcome resistance to probe more deeply into the unconscious to identify forgotten, repressed thoughts and feelings.**
 
The applied science of psychotherapy as developed and practiced by Freud does not differ much from what nearly all psychologists and psychiatrists do today. Freud’s so-called free association is more of a probing of the patient’s subconscious in an uncritical, unjudgmental manner to encourage thoughts and emotions to rise to consciousness. Freud’s technique, as becomes clear in his many discussions of therapy, is not the caricature we sometimes see today with the therapist saying repeatedly, “uh-huh, uh-huh,” and not much else. In fact, Freud often explores a patient’s line of thought and offers hypotheses about earlier unconscious ideation. His goal, after all, is to help patients gain or regain their independence—Freud’s word (Outline, 26).
 
The Freudian couch? Initially a gift from a patient in 1890; the carpet covering added by Freud “gave his patients a non-medical bed to lie on” and “the sense of being sheltered from one’s daily cares.” In addition, many patients were female and in his day understandably uncomfortable talking about sex while looking at a man. Freud also did not want his patients attempting to read his facial expressions, nor did her take notes, which he believed to be distracting.
 
Free association? Einfall, according to Bettelheim (94-96), a word that  means sudden or chance idea or thought, would lead Freud to ask, “What comes to mind?” or “What is connected with that?” Freie assoziation were words used by Freud only after the technique had become established and then Einfall was described and translated into English as such. The modifier “free” or  freie, Bettelheim writes, puts too much emphasis on the need for conscious effort, rather than emotional spontaneity coming from the unconscious.
 
The fundamental rule of psychoanalytic therapy, as Freud refers to it, is that nothing is off the table for discussion (Outline, 28-29). Whatever connections come to mind, including especially painful, nonsensical, or allegedly unimportant, thoughts must be expressed while on the couch. This includes the content and memory of dreams.
 
 
Assessment of Freud. Contributions to psychology? Nearly everything—from the nature of the conscious and subconscious mind to the cause of neurosis and its treatment in therapy. Talk therapy today is the dominant technique of psychotherapists (unless, unfortunately, they are the psychiatrists who prescribe psychotropic drugs to allegedly treat and cure psychological problems). What else would therapists do but talk to their patients? What nearly all today do not do is mention the words introspection, free will, or the sub- or unconscious, the former two because they are afraid of being accused of being “unscientific” or even religious, the latter, unless they are psychoanalysts, of being accused of Freudianism.
 
Over the years, ideation has become more explicit as thinking errors in cognitive psychology and in the work of Yochelson and Samenow on the criminal personality. It has become more precise as core evaluations in the psychology of Edith Packer (chap. 1).
 
As for Freud’s alleged weak ego—the I—let me quote him in Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear (162).*** In this work, Freud points out the “numerous voices” (other psychoanalysts) who seem to want to make the so-called weakness of the I one of the “central pillars” of psychoanalysis. Freud responds: “Shouldn’t their sheer awareness of how repression actually works deter psychoanalysts in particular from so enthusiastically embracing such an extreme and partisan position?” The whole point of therapy being to reclaim and support the I.
 
What does impinge on and reduce the power of the conscious mind to control our lives is Freud’s determinism. His search for non-volitional causes of behavior is what I believe led him to focus heavily on the drives, rather than ideation, and specifically on the alleged death or destructiveness drive to explain the harmful and detrimental behavior of his patients. Though the notion of a strong unconscious has a long history, going back to Plato, free will is what enables us to learn how to introspect to explain and change our feelings deriving from an un- (or sub-) conscious “chaos” or “cauldron full of seething excitations,” as Freud describes it (New Introductory Lectures, 91). The chaos is something we have put there, and this means we can, through introspection, clean up the mess.
 
With good parenting and teaching, one would hope, psychology of the future will help prevent the mess from occurring in the first place.
 
 
* The standard translation (100) of the first sentence is “Where id was, there ego shall be.” Or, as I rephrased it in an updated form in Independent Judgment and Introspection (176), using the psychology of Edith Packer, “Where subconscious, mistaken conclusions were, there confident and independent self-assertion shall guide.” See Bettelheim’s discussion (61-64) of Goethe’s Faust, which Freud knew well, and Faust’s struggles to reclaim his soul from the devil—an apt analogy to describe what many of Freud’s patient’s felt, and most likely, what many patients today feel.
 
** Edith Packer minimized the value of transference, but did describe herself as a “friend for hire,” which I would say was a strong motivating force for patients who likely, at the time, did not have many good, that is, understanding and helpful, friends.
 
*** This 2003 translation uses the word “fear” instead of the customary “anxiety” because, the translator notes, it is the typical German meaning of Angst. When Freud means anxiety, he uses the word Ängstlichkeit or Angstneurose for anxiety neurosis (note 3, 264-65).
 
 
Postscript to Students of Ayn Rand. I regret having to make the following comment about Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff. I see no evidence that either one read much or any of Sigmund Freud. Rand wrote that Freud was one of Europe’s “hand-me-downs” and Peikoff caricatured Freud’s view of man as an “ordure [excrement]-strewn pervert.” I believe that this post and my previous six about Freud speak for themselves. Ayn Rand said to both Nathaniel Branden and Edith Packer that she did not know anything about psychology. Having known Dr. Peikoff for many years, I do not believe he knows much about it either. A strong infusion of psychology into Ayn Rand’s philosophy is desperately needed today.

The Basic Science of Psychoanalysis

“Basic sciences,” as I wrote in last month’s post, “are fundamental sciences, such as physics, biology, and psychology, on which applied sciences rest, such as, respectively, engineering, medicine, and psychotherapy.”
 
Let me now summarize in brief the basic science of psychoanalysis. Freud says that human beings possess needs that give rise to drives, or urges to act, to satisfy those needs. The process requires mental activity to identify what will satisfy the need and action to attain it. The causal impetus from these mostly unconscious biological drives is what Freud calls the “pleasure principle,” though a better translation of lust, according to H. F. Brull, would be joy or desire.
 
For example, when dying of thirst on a hot summer morning, I often feel a strong desire for a glass of water and experience joy in its consumption. The “reality principle” of our reasoning mind, however, can interfere with, detour, or adapt my unconscious drive because of what is required for daily life in the world.
 
The I may remind us, in other words, as it often does me, soon after drinking the cold glass of water that perhaps it was not a good idea and that sips of water with food would have produced a better outcome. The upper I, our memories of parental influence (plus other influences), may also have something to say about this reminding us not to drink too much water on an empty stomach in the morning, unaccompanied by food.
 
This in a highly simplified nutshell is the essence of Freud’s theory of normal psychology. Deficiencies in meeting our innate (psychological) needs lead to neurosis.
 
Hunger and thirst, of course, are not the drives that Freud focuses on, though he does use them as analogies.* His main drive is the libido, a Latin word adopted by him that means wish, desire, or love. In his younger years it meant the sex urge, but he broadened it later to mean emotional energy that originates in our sexuality, expressing our sense of self. When connected to the I-drive, it emphasizes and expresses self-assertion (Brull’s preferred translation for Selbstbehauptung, as opposed to the standard translation of “self-preservation”). Libido is the life force or love drive that motivates us.
 
Sense of self can be interpreted as self-esteem, which Freud was not unaware of as a psychological need, and he did observe its deficiency in many of his patients. Freud, however, did not emphasize self-esteem as a need or drive, though in several places he quotes patients expressing precisely what Edith Packer calls core evaluations. “I always had a low opinion of myself,” says one patient (Studies on Hysteria, 278). And “I can’t accomplish anything. I can’t succeed in anything,” says another (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 59). Loss of love in childhood, says Freud, can lead to “a legacy of diminished self-feeling amounting to a narcissistic scar” (58), the German word for self-feeling being Selbstgefühls, which also can be translated as self-esteem, though the former is probably more correct.
 
Self-feeling, rather than self-esteem, is more in line with Freud’s concept of narcissism, a self-absorption of children, and adults who are physically or mentally ill. That is, narcissists lack maturity (in the case of children) or health (in adults) to allow themselves to focus on and love—that is, to invest one’s libido in—other people or even material goods to enhance their lives. Being in love, says Freud, increases our self-feeling by reducing narcissism. Suffering neurosis, however, reduces self-feeling, which leads to various symptoms, including the sense of inferiority that most neurotics experience.
 
Narcissism for Freud is inherent in all of us from birth as part of the libido drive that most of us do not and probably cannot overcome. Sublimation, or rising above the lower biological drives, means, for example, pursuing de-sexualized artistic or intellectual careers. Such paths, however, he says, are not open to everyone.
 
In my words, I would say that the libido drive is the pursuit of values, including romantic values, in oneself and in the pleasure of the company of others. The pursuit of mistaken or unhealthy values then is what leads to neurosis.
 
In childhood, this pursuit of values includes the exploration of our sexuality.
 
According to Freud, sexuality develops in childhood in three stages of sensuousness: the oral, sucking of the breast and thumbs; the sadistic-anal, of learning to control defecation (and maybe even playing with the feces) coinciding with teething and therefore “sadistic” biting (though I would put “terrible twos” here, the beginning of self-assertion, but Freud does not mention it); and the genital, with all the questions about where babies come from and the differences between the sexes that follow, and of course, the pleasure of touching the genitals.
 
This was radical for Freud to assert in his time, that sexuality begins before puberty. Sexuality, as he points out, is a broader term than the sex or sexual relations of adults. His Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is a daring and non-judgmental (that is, de-moralized) masterpiece for his time, covering all forms of sexuality, which include all the known deviations from penile-vaginal intercourse. A fixation on the foot or a piece of clothing—fetishes, in other words—or inversions (for example, voyeurism at the same or opposite sex), Freud points out, develop early and cause neurotic problems in adulthood.
 
Freud focused so much on sex because his Victorian culture produced in his patients problems that derived from their early childhood experiences, and especially from the often negative reactions of their parents. Women, for example, may not have been taught or known anything about sex and young men, in addition to suffering threats of having their penises cut off, were considerably bothered by coitus interruptus, the withdrawal method of birth control, and impotence.**
 
When the libido, also called the Eros drive, misfires, the death or destructiveness drive leads us to a “flight into illness” and “withdrawal from reality” (Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 54). The misfiring produces “excitation” (one of Freud’s neurophysiological terms) experienced during disturbing or frightening events, often in childhood, that were not dealt with appropriately at the time. Thus, the emotions of multiple events are condensed and displaced into a symptom, while the ideation of the events is repressed.
 
In my summary of the “Little Hans” case (October post) I pointed out how anxiety, the fear with no apparent object, is experienced in response to the “excitations” of disturbing events, which can also be described as a misfiring or blocking of the libido, and how the ideas associated with the events are subsequently repressed or pushed out of conscious awareness, not recurring sometimes until adulthood and then only as neurotic symptoms. Repression is the fundamental defense that the I uses to protect itself, but there are other defenses, such as reaction formation, projection, and regression, as well as displacement and sublimation.
 
Most of these concepts of defense—reaction formation the exception—predate Freud, but he gave them new and more developed meanings, especially as they apply to psychology. The Oedipal Complex is original to Freud and is his metaphor for childhood injury that results from parental reactions to the overemphasis of libido on one parent, usually the mother, and underemphasis on the other, the father.
 
The above, I hope, presents a sense of Freud’s large and complex system, or at least some of his key concepts. Next month, Freud’s applied science of psychotherapy.
 
 
* See especially Freud’s (90-92) discussion of the evolution of psychoanalytic theory that began with what he called the “popular” distinction between the drives of hunger and love.
 
** Josef Breuer (21), from whom Freud learned the method of talk therapy, in 1880-82 treated a twenty-one year old woman whose “sexuality,” he described, “was astonishingly undeveloped.” The woman was Bertha Pappenheim but in print was referred as Anna O.

Freud as Scientist

As I have written before (1, 2), the essence of science and scientific method is “conceptualization, the mental process of generalizing to identify universals and applying previously formed universals to understand particular cases.*
 
The former is a process of induction and is called basic science, the latter a process of deduction (1, 2) and is called applied science. Most scientists perform both types in varying degrees, some spending most of their time on basic science, others on application.
 
Scientific method, which seeks to identify the distinguishing characteristic of a physical or mental entity under study and the causal relations between an entity’s attributes and other entities and their attributes, always involves experimentation—testing and trying one’s ideas against the real world. It may or may not be controlled experimentation. Statistical methodology and exact measurement (Applying Principles, 322-24) do not constitute the essence of science, but they can be adjuncts to the formation of universals and both may be helpful in applying those universals.
 
The present post rests on Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts (chap. 1-2), which emphasizes measurement omission in the formation of concepts and therefore in the identification of universals. Looking at an individual concrete instance of a concept means considering all of the concrete’s characteristics. These include quantitative ones that are typically measured by a precise unit, as is the physical sciences. And it includes qualitative characteristics that are typically measured approximately, as in the human sciences.
 
Basic sciences are fundamental sciences, such as physics, biology, and psychology, on which applied sciences rest, such as, respectively, engineering, medicine, and psychotherapy.
 
Sigmund Freud is an excellent example of both a basic and applied scientist of human nature, of the human science of psychology. Psychoanalysis is the basic theory, while psychoanalytic therapy is the applied science or practice of the basic theory. Freud called psychoanalysis the “science of the unconscious,” or depth psychology, while psychology in general, according to Freud, is the science of the soul, which consists of three parts: our conscious reasoning mind and seat of emotions (the I—see last month’s post on English translations), our conscience (the upper I), and unconscious (the it). Freud was an atheist his entire life, as well as a determinist, so the soul for him is not immortal nor do we have free will.
 
Freud as scientist, we might say, is a post-Kantian, modern Aristotelian (see especially chap. 3).“Post-Kantian” means that consciousness has an active, creative nature or identity, while “modern Aristotelian” means that an active, creative consciousness can, guided by Aristotelian logic, accurately perceive reality. A modern Aristotelian in this sense rejects Aristotle’s naïve realism that the essence of a thing is “out there” in the thing but retains his premise of the primacy of existence. Consciousness does not create or distort reality, as Kant and many other philosophers say, or reflect or mirror it, as the naïve realists think. The modern Aristotelian holds that consciousness creates—note the different meaning here of “create,” as opposed to how the Kantians and other primacy-of-consciousness philosophers use the term—concepts and principles based on what it has correctly recognized or identified of reality.
 
As a student, Freud attended the lectures of Aristotelian scholar Franz Brentano and was influenced by him. This is indicated in particular by Freud’s frequent use of the words “nature and essence,” often followed by “origin” (cause) of a mental process that he was trying to identify. He never went looking for Kantian noumena or so-called intrinsic essences or Newtonian algebraic equations. (Freud in fact rarely mentions Kant in his writings.) He does, however, recognize that both normal and abnormal psychologies exhibit quantities of emotional energy that are measured approximately on an ordinal or qualitative scale of less and more.  
 
In Independent Judgment and Introspection (78-79), I point out how Freud spent many years working out the correct meaning of repression as distinguished from the more general concept of defense, clarifying the two in 1926 (97-99, 110-12). In those earlier years he had considered the two synonymous. He recognized finally that repression is a response to anxiety and attempt to allay it, not a cause of anxiety, as he had earlier thought. It is neurotic anxiety that gives rise to the neurotic need for repression.
 
This is conceptualization, and it is how science works.
 
Or as Freud wrote in An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (31), “Every science is based on observations and experiences arrived at through the medium of our psychical apparatus” (that is, our mental processes), though psychology differs from physics in that psychology uses its mental processes to study and make inferences about mental processes, where physics uses the mental processes to make inferences about the external world. Both sciences often infer what is not directly perceivable. This last Freud describes as unrecognizable or invisible—“unerkennbar” in scare quotes in Freud’s German. The standard translation is “unknowable,” but Freud’s meaning clearly is not Kantian. He means that gravity and molecules are no more directly perceivable than the processes of our subconscious minds.
 
In addition, Freud points out, our awareness (through sense perception) of the physical world, provides “insight into connections and dependent relations which are present” in that world, reproduced in our minds as thought and knowledge that enable us not just to understand external reality, but also to anticipate and change it. And because the procedures of the science of psychology are “quite similar” to those of physics, says Freud, our awareness (through introspection) of the mental world provides similar insight about “connections and dependent relations” of the conscious and subconscious mind, to understand both and to anticipate and change (that is, treat through introspective analysis) their mental functioning (Outline, 83).
 
The “thought and knowledge” that accumulates in our minds, whether of physics or psychology, consist of concepts and principles, and the process of forming and applying concepts and principles is conceptualization. To put this in Ayn Rand’s terms, science is the mental process of identifying the nature of entities and their attributes—physical or mental—including in particular the motions of the entities caused by those attributes. This last is Aristotelian causality based on formal causation, or as Rand puts it, causality is “identity in action.”
 
Science thus identifies entities and their attributes and causes and effects (connections and dependent relations) by constructing and defining concepts that identify the nature and essence of those entities and attributes.**
 
To add one more point, Freud as scientist, in the words of philosopher Walter Kaufmann (80), often considers “objections and alternatives,” many of which we still hear today, but were addressed and answered by him in his time, the accusation of “pan-sexualism” just being one example. As Kaufmann writes, considering objections and alternatives is the “essence of critical thinking.”***
 
Let me conclude this post with a description of science and scientific method, especially as it applies to psychology, written by Freud in partial answer to the religious dogmatism of his critics.

This is the way of science: slow, groping, laborious. . . . Through observation one learns something new, now here, now there, and at first the pieces do not fit together. One formulates surmises and makes auxiliary constructions that one takes back when they are not confirmed; one requires a lot of patience, readiness for all possibilities, renounces early convictions lest under their compulsion one should overlook new and unexpected factors; and in the end all this exertion proves worthwhile, the scattered finds do fit together, one gains an insight into an altogether new piece of psychic processes, is done with the task and ready for the next one. Only the help that [controlled] experiments provide for research has to be dispensed with in analysis. (Kaufmann translation, 79-80; see standard translation in New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 215-16).

This is conceptualization.
 
Next month: “The Basic Science of Psychoanalysis.”
 
 
* And, to emphasize, scientists are not the only ones performing these mental processes. We all perform them, generalization especially in our younger years of parental and formal education, application every day using our acquired knowledge to guide our lives.
 
** As this post demonstrates, Freud was most emphatically a scientist, which means he and  his theory of psychoanalysis are in no way “pseudo-science,” as the positivists and, especially, Karl Popper (1, chap. 1; 2, 74-75), like to say.
 
*** I would say that the essence of critical thinking is the formulation of concepts and principles that correctly recognize or identify, that is, not contradict, the facts of reality. It is the ability to perceive reality through unfiltered or discolored lenses. Considering objections and alternatives is one of the main ways we test and try our ideas against reality, that is, remove contradictions.

Reading Freud: In General and in English Translation in Particular

Reading Sigmund Freud is a challenge, something I have been doing for several months. One reason is his approach to the science of psychology and a second is the English translations.
 
Freud was trained as a medical doctor specializing in neurophysiology at the University of Vienna, though in his first year he attended the lectures of Aristotelian scholar Franz Brentano and was influenced by him. As a young man, Freud worked six years in a physiology lab and three more in a hospital where he focused on cerebral anatomy. In 1886, at age 30, he opened his medical practice and began treating patients for psychological problems. He did not close the practice until shortly before his death in 1939.
 
In 1895, Freud drafted a “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” premised entirely on neurophysiology, but it was never completed or published in his lifetime, most likely because his treatment of patients convinced him of the need to view psychology as a mental science. While Freud in his mature and later life was neither a materialist nor a reductionist, some neurophysiological jargon permeates his work, such as charge and discharge of energy, excitation, and innervation. He was a determinist his entire life, but the reader can overcome this obstacle by focusing on his conceptualizations of psychology and his methods of therapy.
 
The worst challenge in reading Freud is the translations. I do not know German, though I have frequently consulted several online and printed German-English dictionaries, and occasionally have looked at this website, freud2lacan.com, where many of Freud’s works are posted as bilingual texts, English on one side of the page, German on the other.
 
My references for criticism of the translations are three native German speakers: philosopher Walter Kaufmann (20-27), Austrian-born psychologist Bruno Bettelheim (all of his 112-page book, Freud and Man’s Soul), and Freud biographer Peter Gay (465-66). The three overlap in their critiques, though Bettelheim’s is the most extensive.
 
I will focus on mistranslations and neologisms, but let me first give Kaufmann credit for setting the tone by asserting that the English translations of philosopher Immanuel Kant improve Kant’s writing style (!), while the translations of Freud make him worse. He also says that Freud’s “style is so colorful that the best translations often cannot be more adequate than black-and-white photographs of great paintings.”
 
Kaufmann goes on to cite Peter Gay (see footnote in my August post) who said the translations make Freud more diffuse and verbose (prolix) and gentrified, scholarly, academic (genteel) than he really is. The word in my mind is sterile.*
 
Bettelheim (5-8, 108) says the translations make Freud impersonal and abstract with Latinized and Greekized words and sometimes translate him in the passive voice when Freud uses the active. Freud is even made to sound behavioristic, apparently in order to make him more “scientific,” which in philosophic terms means more positivistic, which Freud was not!
 
Bettelheim became aware of the problems with the English translations when he was at the University of Chicago’s Orthogenic School from 1944-73. His staff and students, as non-German speakers, read Freud in English, which made them view him and psychoanalysis “at a distance.”
 
The most egregious (my word) mistranslation is of the German word trieb, translated throughout as “instinct.” The real meaning is drive, the urge to act when a need is not being satisfied. The hunger drive is offered by Freud as analogous to his life and death drives. (More on these next month). Freud rarely uses the German equivalent for instinct (instinkt) and only to refer to the alleged automatic knowledge that guides animal behavior.**
 
The use of “instinct” makes Freud look unscientific and an advocate of innate knowledge. Freud uses the term “drive” as a cause that “makes somatic demands upon the mind,” but these demands are changeable and compete with one another (An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, 17). They are not instincts.
 
Indeed, Bettelheim (105) insists that the title of Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, one of Freud’s later works in English, should be translated as “Drives and Their Mutability.”
 
The most egregious neologism—this time “egregious” is Peter Gay’s word—is the Greek import  cathexis. Freud wrote using common German words, Besetzung being one of them with many connotations. The meaning of the word as Freud used it is occupation, as in military occupation. It is sometimes translated in other languages as load or investment (of emotion). Freud suggested the word “interest,” and in the 1926 Britannica.com summary of psychoanalysis, written by Freud, the words “affective charge” are used. Besetzung is a term of value and emotion and the “occupation” is a quantity—high or low, strong or weak—of emotional energy.
 
Thus, I might say I am highly “cathected” in the family dog, or rather, “occupied” with a lot of value and emotion in him. My brain, however, still freezes when I come upon cathexis or any of its word forms (hypercathexis, anticathexis, etc.) in the translations. I must pause to review the context of the word before continuing.
 
Another neologism, parapraxis, can be dispensed with quickly. Fehlleistungen means faulty action or achievement, or in common English parlance Freudian slip—of the tongue, pen, memory. Why the Greek?
 
Other mistranslations (Bettelheim, chap. 8): id, ego, and superego in German are das Es, das Ich, and das Über-Ich. They should be what they are, and are so translated in the French and Spanish editions, the it, the I, and the upper-I. “The it,” a word used by Friedrich Nietzsche and a contemporary physician of Freud’s, was chosen to describe the unconscious because Freud’s patients would say something like, “It got me again” or “It makes life unbearable.” “The I,” in German can mean the self or personality; “self” is the word I substitute when reading the English. Über can mean above or over, but I like Bettelheim’s “upper-I,” because it emphasizes that our conscience is a part of our minds (implying that we put it there), not some compartment separate from the self or mind. The Latinizations make Freud and our understanding of the mind sterile. Cold technical jargon, as Bettelheim says (53).
 
Though many more mistranslations can be found in Bettelheim’s book (chap. 10) and in Independent Judgment and Introspection (81n56), one final one is for the subject of psychology as Freud discusses it. The German word is Seele, which means soul, and Seele, Freud points out, is the German translation of the Greek word for soul, psyche. Thus, psychology is the science of the soul, not mind or consciousness, though it can include both, and soul is neither immortal nor related to religion. For Freud, according to Bettelheim (77), soul means “that which is most valuable in man while he is alive.” It is not just the seat of reason, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the seat of emotion. It defines who we are and what motivates us.***
 
To conclude and say something positive about the translations, James Strachey was editor and translator of what is called the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. It was a major accomplishment, twenty-four volumes published between 1953 and 1974, every volume with an excellent index and an abundance of footnotes and bracketed comments that explain, for example, someone from Freud’s era whom we would not today recognize. It is still the most significant scholarly work in English on Freud. There is supposedly a “Revised Standard Edition” coming out soon, but I have not yet seen it.
 
Next month, “Freud as Scientist.”
 
 
* Kaufmann, I should further point out, makes it clear that Freud was neither dogmatic nor intolerant. The smears against him, aside from much suspicion, laughter, outrage, and disgust thrown at psychoanalysis by the local Viennese who had not read him, derive from the resentments and complaints of Freud’s former devotees, Alfred Adler and Carl Jung (Kaufmann, 195-204, 325-50). The former, in particular, referred to psychoanalysis as “filth and fecal matter” (Kaufmann, 199). Gay (410) acknowledges that Freud is a “determinist, [but] not a fatalist,” a reference to the misunderstanding that we are allegedly and completely controlled by the unconscious, which ignores Freuds frequent assertions that in therapy the unconscious must be made conscious.
 
** Today, the concept “instinct” should be dispensed with as invalid. Biologists have made great progress in explaining animal behavior, whether it is how to hunt (they learn from their parents, siblings, or by trial-and-error), to migrate to warmer weather (birds use information from the sun, stars, and magnetic field), or to find their way home (cats use the magnetic field and scent).
 
*** After completing this essay, I discovered H. F. Brull’s excellent 1975 paper, “A Reconsideration of Some Translations of Sigmund Freud.” A native German speaker, born in Berlin, Brull at age twelve, in 1933, emigrated to the United States. For most of his career he was a social worker with children and high school students. Brull asserts that psychoanalysis is “at once a scientific method for investigating the mind of man and a therapy for tortured souls.” I will be referring to this paper more in a later post.
 
And the more I read Freud, the more I discover additional criticisms of the standard translations, as well as improved contemporary ones (published within the last twenty-five years). Here are two: Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (2003) and The Penguin Freud Reader (2006).

Freud on Neurosis and Psychotherapy as Illustrated in the Little Hans Case

The aim of psychotherapy, according to Sigmund Freud, is to make the unconscious conscious by uncovering repressed ideation, that is, ideas associated with the emotion of a triggering or traumatic event, and verbalizing the repressed ideas while also reexperiencing or reliving the emotions that were displaced to a symptom or symptoms. The process is called abreaction in the English translation.*
 
Psychological problems—neurosis—often result from repressed childhood injury, Freud discovered, but may also occur later in life. And not all such problems result from sexual trauma as a child, a view called “pan-sexualism,” which Freud’s critics accuse him of saying. (See Freud’s denial in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, preface to fourth edition and elsewhere).
 
Freud wrote several case histories to exhibit his method of therapy, as well as his theory of the causes and cures of neurotic symptoms. Let me illustrate this with a summary of his “Little Hans” case about a five-year-old boy with a phobia of horses. The case was published in 1909.
 
Though Freud only met with the boy once, when he was not quite five, the case is an excellent example of why he thought psychoanalysts do not need to have an MD degree to practice psychoanalysis, which many of his medical critics thought, including especially American physicians.**
 
The parents in this case were not medical doctors, though they knew Freud. The father of Hans attended Freud’s Wednesday night group (which in 1910 became the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society) and Hans’s mother had been Freud’s patient. They were both encouraged by Freud to use minimal coercion in their parenting and neither laugh at nor bully Hans about his phobia. The father conducted most of the analysis by asking non-judgmental questions, taking Hans’s answers seriously, and sending letters with the answers to Freud. This occurred over the first five months of 1908 before and after Hans turned five.
 
Hans’s main symptom was the phobia of horses, which began as an anxiety of unknown origin while walking in the street with his father. At the time he wanted to go home to “coax” (cuddle) with his mother. On another occasion while walking with his mother, he became afraid that a white horse would bite him.  Upon questioning by his father, Hans recalled an event  some time earlier when he witnessed a large work horse fall and “make a row” with its feet. This frightened Hans considerably as he thought the horse might be dead. Subsequently, in early 1908, Hans was hesitant to go out into the busy street in front of his home where many horse-drawn carts and coaches would be seen. His anxiety had transformed into a mature phobia of horses.
 
The emotions of anxiety and fright that became the phobia are displacements from the repressed cause, according to Freud. Let us explore the possibilities. There were several.
 
From the age of three, Hans, like most boys his age, became interested in his “widdler” (penis, or wiwimacher in the German) and “widdling.” He also naturally became fascinated by the widdlers of others, including those of animals, and curious about whether his baby sister and mother had widdlers. He was especially fascinated by the largeness of the widdlers of giraffes and horses. He liked touching his.
 
At about three-and-a-half, his mother (apparently reverting to older methods of parenting) saw him in this activity and told him that if he keeps touching it she will call the doctor to have it cut off. Because it was implied by his mother that this “activity” was naughty and dirty, Hans acquired what Freud calls a castration complex with the fears becoming repressed. This was also about the time his sister Hanna was born, of whom he soon became jealous.
 
Other issues were relevant. His parents, unfortunately, told him that his baby sister was delivered by stork, which led to speculation of how that happens. More particularly, when it became obvious that babies somehow come from the mother, Hans wondered how. From the mom’s rear end, for example?
 
Freud was critical of the parents for not informing Hans about the differences in sex organs of boys and girls and for not enlightening him about sexual intercourse between his mother and father. This last is important for Freud because he found that children who witness or hear their parents having sex usually conclude that it is an act of violence with the dad harming the mother. Freud concluded that if the parents had been more open about these two issues, the phobia of Hans could have been resolved more quickly. According to the father, Hans never witnessed his parents having sex—although he did sleep in their bed until he was four.
 
The central issue for Hans revolves around what Freud calls the Oedipal complex, which does not mean that five-year old boys want to have sexual intercourse with their mothers. It is metaphor summing up common issues that arise between children and their parents, especially when there is an attachment to the mother and lesser feeling toward, and in some cases alienation from, the father. The Oedipal myth is about self-discovery, which is what psychoanalytic therapy is about.
 
Hans did show more attachment to his mother than to his father, but Hans’s dad was unusual—for dads then and now—by being so lovingly interested in and patient to help Hans with his phobia, or “nonsense,” as Hans referred to it, talking to him about widdlers, babies (his sister), large and small animals (and their widdlers), and often encouraging him to go out to the street where horses could be seen to test his “nonsense.” That Hans was aware of his nonsense as an issue indicates his eagerness to seek a remedy.
 
Sometimes, when the family was on summer vacation away from Vienna, the dad would have to return to the city for business. Hans once said, “When you’re away, I’m afraid you’re not coming home,” which was then followed by a benevolent emphasis by his father that he always comes home.
 
The attachment to his mother is shown as follows. The “seduction” scene, as Freud refers to it, using the word broadly, not literally, occurred when Hans’s mother was giving him a bath and he said to her, “Why don’t you put your finger there?” (on his widdler). His mother responded that that would be piggish and improper. On another occasion, which Freud describes as a second seduction, Hans said to his mother that his aunt recently said that he has a “dear little thin­­-gummy.” And once after an anxiety dream, Hans awoke crying, “I thought you were gone and I had no Mummy to coax with.” In addition to these issues of attachment to his mother, Hans was not able to see her during her confinement (last several weeks) of pregnancy. Much of this came out during the Q&A sessions with his father.
 
In early April, 1908, Hans and his father paid a brief visit to Freud. Observing the two sitting opposite him and listening to Hans describe how he disliked the black thing around the horses’ mouths (the bridle strap above the nose that usually holds a metal bit for control), Freud made a connection between the bridle and the father’s black mustache. Freud said that because Hans is so fond of his mother, he must think his father is angry with him. The father responded by asking why Hans would think such a thing, since he, the father, had never scolded or hit him. But yes, Hans intervened, you did hit me once, which happened as a reflex hit after Hans had head butted him in the stomach!
 
After this short visit to Freud, the father reported that Hans’s phobia began to retreat, as Hans was more open to talking about his repressed wishes. Many additional concrete details that cannot be summarized here, including associations between his feelings toward horses and his feelings toward his parents, followed in Hans’s life, but more intimate Q&A sessions occurred between Hans and his father, such as: Do you wish your sister had not been born? And on a different occasion, do you wish she would fall into the bath water and die? Both answers were yes, the psychological meaning being that his sister was robbing him of his parents’ love. And such an occurrence (her death) would leave more time for him to spend with his mother.
 
These verbalizations about his sister, father and mother, and his widdler (the castration complex) constitute the ideation Freud talks about that led to a gradual melting of his symptoms of anxiety and fright of horses.
 
Near the end of this period, Hans experienced and talked about a number of fantasies with his father, including his wish to marry his mummy and, sometimes, his wish that his father would go away. One day, Hans’s father saw him playing with imaginary children and said to him that boys cannot have children to which Hans responded, “I know. I was their Mummy before, now I’m their Daddy.” Who’s their Mummy? the father asked. “Mummy, and you’re their Grandaddy” (Freud’s italics).
 
To this, Freud concluded, “The little Oedipus had found a happier solution than that prescribed by destiny” (for Oedipus the King). Hans’s father wrote to Freud shortly afterwards, “A trace of his disorder still persists, though it is no longer in the shape of fear.”
 
It was the content of the Q&A sessions with the father, as well as the comments made by Freud during the visit with him, that constitute the ideation associated with Hans’s emotions, the emotions that troubled him sufficiently to transform them into a fear of horses. And it was this ideation that Freud asserts is necessary to be made explicit and conscious (which in an adult would likely have long since been deeply repressed). The various expressions in Hans’s words of his fears and anxieties were the “abreactions” Freud refers to as being essential for successful therapy. The job performed by Hans’s father got Hans to bring out or “work off and get rid of” the ideas and emotions of the triggering events, which then encouraged the displaced emotions in the symptoms to melt away.
 
Hans’s father was Max Graf (1873–1958), a Viennese musicologist. Hans was Herbert Graf (1903–73), a highly successful opera producer and director, including twenty-four years between 1936 and 1960 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City (read interview in Opera News, 1972). At age nineteen, Herbert visited Freud, who described him as a “strapping youth” who seemed to have survived “puberty without any damage” and, though his parents had divorced and remarried, kept his emotional life intact by going through “one of the severest of ordeals” (the divorce).
 
In this post, I have deliberately used a minimum of Freud’s technical terms, including especially the many questionable English translations. Next month, I will address the challenge of reading Freud in general and in specific the English translations.
 
 
* Freud’s word in German is abreagieren, which means to work off or get rid of. As mentioned in the first post in this series, I prefer the word subconscious to Freud’s “un-,” but when quoting or citing Freud will use unconscious. I consider them similar, though not synonymous. Abreaction in modern terms seems close to derepression.
 
** From 1926–32, American psychoanalysts succeeded in getting a law passed making it illegal for anyone to practice psychoanalysis without the MD degree (Bettelheim, 33–34). Today, a master’s degree is the minimum, but a degree with “doctor” in it is still preferred. In 1926 Freud wrote The Question of Lay Analysis to argue why laypersons (non-doctors) should be allowed to practice his method and theory.