Intellectualization - Psychoanalytic Controversy

Psychoanalytic Controversy

Freud's theory of psychoanalysis is a formidable intellectual construct. During its most formative decade, the 1890s, 'we find Breuer writing to their friend Fliess: "Freud's intellect is soaring at its highest. I gaze after him as a hen at a hawk"'. However the roots and the nature of his intellectual theoretization have themselves been the subject over many decades of fierce controversy.

To the less sympathetic eye, 'the legacy of Freud's neurosis was an extraordinary intellectual grandiloquence...he was a conquistador. His self-analysis had laid bare universal truths'; while in the process 'Freud had developed an autocratic, antiempirical intellectual style' to expound them.

Others however would valorise the self-same features. 'The intolerable scandal in the time before Freudian sexuality was sanctified was that it was so "intellectual"', wrote Lacan approvingly, who claimed to 'recognize bad psychoanalysts...by the word they use to deprecate all technical or theoretical research..."intellectualization" '. Lacan himself - with his 'grafting of an ambitious philosophy of "the human" on to an argument purporting to be a contribution to the study of specific mental disorders' - was of course exposed to exactly the same charge: 'My own conception of the dynamics of the unconscious has been called an intellectualization - on the grounds that I based the function of the signifier in the forefront'.

Freud himself made no bones about his 'sort of greed for knowledge'; knew well the process whereby 'research becomes to some extent compulsive, a substitute for sexual activity'. He was aware too of the tension in his work between speculation and restraint - 'the succession of boldly playing imagination and ruthlessly realistic criticism'. He would probably also have accepted the description of 'Freud's habitual thought pattern of going from a minute detail to a high-level abstraction and back again to detail', as well as of 'Freud's characteristic propensity for turning crushing defeat to brilliant intellectual advantage'.

With the slow shift in psychoanalysis from the way 'one model seems to stress intellectual understanding' to the way 'the other model more clearly acknowledges the value of a patient's emotional experience in the analysis', so too there has been an increasing willingness to look at the 'Defensive-Restitutive Function of Freud's Theory of Psychosexual Development'. We can then perhaps see more clearly the extent to which 'his elaboration of psychoanalytic theory...corresponded to a setting up of obsessional defences against depressive anxiety' - his need 'to defend himself against through such a degree of intellectualisation'.