Psychoanalysis and science *

8 gennaio 2001

* Translated by Bruna Marzi

During the first years of my carrier as micropsychoanalist, one day a colleague, professor of psychology asked me: ”do you really believe in psychoanalysis, Peluffo?”. I answered that I had a personal experience of this science and that I practiced it; obviously I recognized that it was a scientific method: “yes, I believed in it”.
She said: “You know, many psychoanalysts say that it is a good therapeutic method, but they are very sceptic if someone asks them further information about the scientific standard of the matter”.
As regards scientific standards, I must say that if we mean the one adopted in cognitive psychology, for example in Piaget’s clinical method, that has allowed to study the different stages of language development and human intelligence, therefore, we have no doubt that psychoanalysis is a scientific method. The developmental stages of aggressive-sexual energy, discovered by S.Freud and his pupils, analysing adult people can be verified by watching the psychobiological development of children.
In other words, observing children during the first six-seven years of their life, we scientifically verify what Freud wrote upon the development of sexuality. Different stages really exists; they intersect and match until the final structuration of adolescent and adult personality.
Unfortunately most of the people that are concerned with psychological and medical science deny this reality, even if they can verify or have the opportunity of verifying it .They may split the relation between connections. In other words they act as there was no relation between the two phenomena.
From a clinical point of view, as well as in cognitive field, people who do not reach the stage of formal operations present a certain degree of mental retard, so a strong nucleus of pregenital fixations imply a certain degree of difficulty in relational adaptation and consequently the necessity of establishing an unstable equilibrium, called “neurotic”.
A baby in the oral stage uses a particular technique and instruments to explore the surrounding world and for problem solving . The solutions that he finds are useful to lower the tension that has obliged the subject to try any way in order to re-establish the altered homeostasis. The baby who closes and opens his eyes to switch on/off the light is very similar to the obsessional adult, fixed to the anal stage,who tries to modify the reality through his rituals.
Often the human being is too proud to admit that his personality is partially guided by an ego sprinkled with infantile fixations and he
refuses its existence; sometimes he considers such a part as pathological and goes to the doctor who often sends him to a psychoanalyst.
Those who did not go to a specialist have made a life and research project on the elaboration of their infantile fixations; in other words they have let their intellect be guided by an infantile mind that took possession of an adult body, and assumed adult clothes pretending to be a man. Among hundreds and hundreds of examples concerning famous minds, let me mention Sade and Hitler.
How could their life have been if they had gone to a psychoanalyst ?
Probably Sade would have analysed and elaborated ,during the sessions, his perverse aggressive and sexual phanthasies. In that case he could have become an “ante litteram” existentialist philosopher and a good novelist.
Hitler would have released his persecuting nucleus and his personal oedipic story which led him to the destruction of jewish people; maybe he would have become a car or motorway builder , or he would have satisfied his creativity by making a regular war with a different destiny, thanks to the scientist who had left Germany. Certainly he would have been a different person.
What about prophets? What could have changed in their life after a psychoanalysis? Would have they become good fathers of a family once they had eliminated their omnipotence delirium including masochistic nucleus? I don’t think so because they had a very strong instinctual energetic pressure canalized on certain ideas; maybe they would have suffered less.
On the other hand it is not impossible to think that an intelligent man in Christ’s time ,proclaims himself god’ s son, thus god. Roman emperors did it everyday and before them there was the God Pharaon.
It is unbelievable that nowadays millions of people and among them scientists too, proclaim themselves Christ’s (god’s son) followers, consequently J. Christ’s brothers and so gods .
Maybe we could give an explanation supposing a complete self-consciousness, I mean that human beings think so because they all are “I am” as well as the Eternal proclaims to Moses and Christ repeats. Frankly speaking I think that the human being is very far from the consciousness of being a psychobiological dynamic, intelligent and perishable entity. The only possible immortality is the one expressed by Lavoisier’s law which guarantees a certain persistence of his particles.
I believe that the only valid explanation of the dichotomy between science and religion is the psychological one which is considered to be not scientific by the exact science. Anyway we must say that, according to the exact science, the psyche concept is not scientific if considered to be something other than brain.
We might suppose that the humanity is in a very young and primitive stage of evolution in which slags are the preponderant part of the psychobiological material which makes it. This humanity has not yet reached the top of its psychophysical possibilities. The top would be without diseases, death and with completely operative and conceptual intelligence. A humanity whose philogenetic and onthogenetic residues of the evolution are completely removed when the newborn becomes adult. These situations can be imagined and supposed, but they are far away. At the present time we must consider that in the human being there is a dichotomy of thinking such that, together with reasonable explanations based on verifiable cause and effect links, there are other more mysterious and fascinating ones.
That’s how reliable scientists wonder about Nostradamus prediction or about possible disasters in the 2000. This implies that they believe that God has established linear and limited time. They do not consider that according to the jewish calendar we are in the year 5759, to the muslim in the 1420, the chinese in the 4697 (cyclic) and in relation to the real Jesus Christ’s birth (during Herod the Great’s kingdom dead in the year4 a.c.) we are already in the year 2004. The last educated transformation of the end of the world was the one regarding the computers’ decay at the beginning of the new millennium. The end of the information system world, that, as everybody knows, did not happened. Psychoanalysis, according to many people “not scientific”, is the only way to explain such phanthasies.

II

We are on the horn of a dilemma: we can use a clinical explanation and consider most of the human beings crazy or we can accept that together with science “A” there is science “B” which tries to explain why “A” followers frequently deny what “A” principles assert.
We may call it a science which studies the effects of individual and collective epistemological remains. Such residues have a repressed base, they exist in their manifest content as codified elaborations and form a spontaneous science which is next to the “exact” one. Statements of this science guide thoughts and behaviors of most of the human beings, including the followers of science “A” who deny and laugh at it.
Some people call it mythological theory, I wouldn't know how to call this kind of science. Certainly it is not philosophy, nor mythology or religion. Maybe I could call it science without written codes whose followers directly participate to nature’s laws and try to dramatize them in co-ordinate actions: for example they buried their dead which were painted with red ochre ,to indicate that life is in the blood.
It is all about , including history and residues of individuals physic-mathematic theory. It is the finest of human culture, as it was developed before the discovery of writing. The result of observation, experience, insight, together with explicative intuition rised by attempts of intuitive intelligence.
I think that intuitive intelligence functioning is similar to the one assigned by M.Jouvet to dreams: a spontaneous re-scheduling of internal and external experiences where cells can’t regenerate and modify themselves anymore.
I don’t know whether I should put psychoanalitical theory in science “A” or “B”. Certainly Freudian thoughts, even with its mistakes in using neurological or evolutionistic explanations, are to be classified in science “A” and its field of study is science “B “as it is visible in the external manifestation during psychoanalytical sessions. Nevertheless it is the heir of science “B”.
Micropsychoanalysis follows the same destiny; the only difference is that micropsychoanalytical theory and methodology allows to amplify the field of study, by stretching the analysis of microscopical details and uses certain technical supports that can be arranged in the sperimental method.

III

I think that the Bible written thousands of years before the vulgar age is the most important example of such a kind of intelligence for the western jewish-christian-muslim people. I believe that it has been composed in the same way Freud describes the construction of a dream (an elaboration of night and day’s residues). That’s the reason why the first fundamental book of the Master is “The interpretation of dreams ”, and the last but not less fundamental is “Moses and monotheism : three essays ”, in which Freud applies, without any obstacle, the midrash technique.
In these two books we can find the most important part of his theory, but in order to conform himself to the needs of positivistic science of his and our time (the exact science which states, for example, that chemistry is not alchemy), he was obliged to assert that Moses was not jewish, but egyptian. As he said that according to the precise way of writing his documents where he transcribed clinical observations and meditations, he was austrian-egyptian, but their birthplace, his personal energetic and instinctual Sinai Mountain-Har Karcom, was jewish. A jewish engine which moves an egyptian car. We have a similar example in religion. I am talking of Paul of Tarso ,the discoverer of christian religion. In that case the car was always jewish but greek-latin styled.
I have spent many years in practicing psychology and psychoanalysis and during this time very often I have been asking myself the following question: why Freud, who did the best in the study of dreams and latent desires hidden into neurotic symptoms, a person who did not have the necessity to demonstrate to anybody his observation and meditation skills, was compelled to write a project of a scientific psychology that he left unfinished? I gave myself this explanation: he probably entered into the “not exact science” field and his difficulty was to believe that his discovery was exact, therefore he was trying to give it a scientific modern authority. Unfortunately such “authority” was probably suitable to his times, but it could decrease the value of his work instead of increasing it. As a matter of fact those who had considered only the neurological part of his theory, have strongly criticized and denigrated him. They did not understand that the neurological point of view was a metaphor suitable to his needs and it could not be more exact at that time.
Furthermore, at the time he was writing the Project, he had an identification with Fliess who had a great influence on him. Freud believed that his friend’s works were more “scientific” than his works. On the contrary many of Fliess’s works are real fallic-scientific phanthasies, that can be interpreted only thanks to psychoanalysis.
Here we are, I’ve pronounced the key word in order to make clear the double aspect of psychoanalytical science: interpretation.
When we analyse, we decompose a compound into its components in order to verify the quality, the quantity and the combination proportions ; to do so we use certain parameters. Once we have found a standard which fixes the compound’s rules, we shall try to explain possible anomalies and to settle the criteria of the compound origin. In other words we’ll try to interpret the anomaly on the base of fixed genetic criteria. Interpretation needs a model and the analyst will do his best to correctly apply the model formulations. Consequently, in order to render objective the application, a special technique will be studied and used to avoid individual fluctuation in his application. The purpose is to keep out those projections and identifications. In this case psychoanalysis is scientific: infact ,certain associative stimulus through interpretation will get statistically homogeneous verbal and behavioral responses.
But psychoanalysis is something more: it follows two ways , which are the same ones used by Freud when he discovered it.
We may say associative thought, which means creativity and phantasy and logical thought, which is the interpretative mechanism.
During the sessions it is possible to verify the dichotomy ,both in the material production and in the analyst/ analysand interaction.
When the analysand can follow the fundamental rule of free associations (part of the mechanism), he creates, remakes and renews his conscious, preconscious and partially unconscious story. He does it through associations, reconstructive elaboration and in the end consciousness and knowledge. The analyst on his hand plays his role via associations and analogical reconstructions, sometimes he uses the interpretative mechanism and expresses hypothetical-deductive logical inferences, which are correct in relation to the definitions of the model.

IV

In his book “Moses and monotheism : three essays”, Freud seems to be less precise with the historical data and when in doubt he uses the most suitable solution to continue his speech even if this solution does not rest on completely sure facts. He doesn’t even spare the use of creative phanthasy. This position became clearer to me once I had read publications on the relations between the Master and Hebraism in particular as regards the Bible, and once I had meditated on the forming of concepts. Very often an idea from a night dream, almost a phantasy, gets so close to the realization that it becomes a matter of discussion and of further investigation. Nowadays there is a current opinion which tends to confirm Freud’s hypothesis on Moses egyptian origins. On the other hand there is another opinion ( E. Anati) which moves the Exodus date back in the time ,at least a 1000 years and establishes that the Sinai mountain is located in Har-Karkom and not in Saint Catherine. Har-Karkom is a place of prehistorical religion where nomadic peoples used to meet periodically since paleolithic time.
I would say that Freud as well as Moses is the witness in a place of meeting among a primary epistemological drive, a basic non- specialistic human science and the unavoidable consequences of compulsion to analysis (decomposition) which death instinct induces in the human being. The compulsion to the decomposition following the drive of the decomposed elements to unit themselves again ( life instinct) , creates the conceptual ensembles, in other words the specialistic sciences. In fact those of type “A” which criticize science “B”. Therefore the Master is the creator of an epistemology which gives account for all sciences, both positivistic and humanistic, because he makes a Metapsychology which is verifiable with the experiment (psychoanalytical session) and can be applied as a criterium of analysis and interpretation to those explanation systems that criticize it. I would like to mention something more: the human being conflict is due to the contemporary presence of “A” and “B” He spends his entire life in trying to solve it. Sigmund Freud gave him the basic instrument: psychoanalysis.