ON FORMULATION IN PSYCHOANALYSIS FREDERIC LYMAN WELLS McLean Hospital, Waverley, Mass. REPRINTED FROM THE JOURNAL OF ABNORAIAL PSYCHOLOGY BOSTON October-November, 1913 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Alternates https://archive.org/details/onformulationinpOOwell ON FORMULATION IN PSYCHOANALYSIS' BY FREDERIC LYMAN WELLS McLean Hospital^ Waverley, Mass, I T has been the writer’s fortune to have many times to reply to the impossible question, Do you believe in psychoanalysis? One cannot answer it simply, but must consider its object in three ways: as a method of research, as a therapeutic agent, as a system of psychological theories. The first two are not to detain us now. That the best way to know how the mind acts is to observe it in action, and that the best way to observe it is by the most complete possible account of what takes place in it, is a proposition so obvious as to call for little criticism. But upon the basis of a body of observational data, probably the most intimate ever focussed upon psychological questions, are constructed many theories of mental function, scarcely one of which has been assimilated to the psychology of scientific method. So far as my vision will reach, this failure is due very largely to matters of formulation. Here the task must be to look beneath the surface, and to study how they can best be formulated so as to render them assimilable with more orthodox standards of psychological thought. An entertaining volume recently come from the pen of a Belgian philologer is largely given to maintaining the importance of being accurate as well as earnest. In formu- lating theories for scientific judgment, we must not allow our phraseology to be regulated by autistic fancies, but recog- nize that in language we are utilizing an important function IRead at the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Psychopathological Association at Washington, May 8, 1913. 3 4 On Formulation in Psychoanalysis of paramountly social significance, not to be dissipated in philologic self-abuse. I feel strongly that an ameliorated formulation will not only make it easier for every one to appreciate adequately what is already known, but will obviate many natural barriers of resistance to the correct interpreting of future observations. The argument is not about whether facts are facts, but whether they are stated and thought of with effective objectivity. The issues contributing most to these formulatory difficulties are three in number; the concepts of the wish, of symbolism, and of sexuality; in which order these remarks are to briefly take them up. The primal difficulty with the psychoanalytic use of the term wish is its well-nigh universal interpretation as a process of high mental level. The psychoanalytic common- places of unconscious wish, wish unacceptable to the main body of the personality, are to most of those who hear them, contradictions in terms. To wish a thing means to desire it consciously, and with the main body of the personality. It is not in the least denied that the processes described in these terms exist, and their recognition is most important; but beware the consequences of new psychological wine in old linguistic bottles. We certainly know that the mental organism is not a close-knit, well-disciplined absolute monarchy, whose every member responds fatally to di- rection from the highest levels; rather is it a loosely gathered democracy, often with most liberal notions of State Rights. Seldom, indeed, is it altogether united on single questions of policy. The majority of the Ichkomplex may be able to enforce its decrees only with difficulty against a riotous minority; which, if it be a sufficiently well organized com- plex, may split off and set up a local government of its own; or even seize the reins of the central authority, and carry on according to its own schizophrenic inclinations. It is thus a far from infrequent experience that one may wish for a thing at the highest level of the personality, and at the same time be wholly conscious of other considera- tions that oppose it, and make the striving for its object less effective. Still others may, it is thought, be unconscious, - and psychoanalysis formulates them all in terms of wish and Frederic Lyman Wells counter-wish. So firmly fixed, however, is the concept of wish as the expression of the organic ‘‘majority,” that its persistent employment in the psychoanalytic sense only confuses those who want to comprehend it and encourages those who do not. A far preferable starting point is the principle of am- bivalence, but best of all is the concept of ambitendency, as developed, for example, by Bleuler. One occasionally ob- serves a psychoanalytic writer to use the terms trend or tendency as the entire equivalents of wish, and it would be well if they largely replaced it. After all, the objective evidence of wish is only in terms of behavior. It has been remarked that we know a thing as we react more certainly, or in any way more effectively according to it. In like manner, the unity at different levels of trends or wishes is given in the certainty and effectiveness of reaction towards them. When all levels of the personality are united, if they ever are, in the direction of a given trend, there is not only the conscious wish therefor, but all reactions of the organism are definitely ordered towards it. In so far as instinctive trends conflict, and there is a division of organic policy, in so far are the biological reactions of the personality not consistently ordered towards the paramount end, but isturbed by reactions the expression of other tendencies inconsistent with it. It seems certain that the psychological failure to assimi- late a large part of the phenomena implied in psycho- pathology of every-day life is not so much a reaction against the above general principle they represent, as against certain interpretations of specific episodes. In presenting this phase of the subject, psychoanalysts have an unfortu- nate tendency to bring into the foreground some bit of analysis forensically impressive if you believe it, but not wearing a clear aspect of validity to the casual observer. In illustrating a general principle, as that gross Fehlleistungen are the product of disunited personality, one should not simultaneously try to exhibit one’s subtlety of analytic power, or this further division of tendency will bring ruin to both aims. The general principle is all but self-evident; failure to act in accordance with a given trend is the most 6 On Formulation in Psychoanalysis objective indication of counter-trend there could possibly be. But the nature of the counter-trend is not given di- rectly in the Fehlleistung, which indeed, is often capable of opposed interpretations. It is possible to say justly that the Fehlleistung is in accord with a certain counter-trend, and may, in cumulative instance, be regarded as evidence of such a trend. A counter-trend in accord with such phenomena is often clearly present in consciousness. The weight to be given such evidence depends first, on the degree of disharmony between the F ehlleistungen and the major ‘‘wishes,” resp. trends, tendencies or impulses of the personality; and second, on the degree of harmony between them and any given counter-trend. The first indicates the divided personality; the second, the lines of cleavage. In fine, we know introspectively that we may heartily wish at one level what is less advantageous at another. But far deeper is our knowledge, from the observation of behavior, that we sometimes react in accordance with cer- tain definite trends, and sometimes against them. There- fore, let us formulate our conceptions of the divisions in personal tendencies not statically in terms of wish and counter-wish, which are at best only secondary inferences below the level of introspection, but dynamically in terms of trend and counter-trend, which are the ultimate criteria of the wish, and are present objectively at all levels of be- havior. In its deductions regarding the character of personal trend and counter-trend, psychoanalysis describes various situations in which actions or mental events recur not in their original form, but from some cause verstellt. The process is a familiar one in daily life, and its relation to psychoanalysis is a question not so much on existential grounds as of the precise sort of symbolisms that the psycho- analytic method is capable of establishing, and whether the previous theoretical formulations of them bear so necessary a relation to psychoanalytic practice as has been commonly thought. An insufficient distinction seems to have been drawn between two kinds of symbolism that I shall try to illustrate concretely. If one contemplates a well-grown Frederic Lyman Wells 7 oak tree, one may naturally think of its similarity to the growth of the British Empire. The oak tree becomes to him, for the nonce, a symbol of the British Empire. But the development of the British Empire has no direct causal relation to the growth of the oak tree. Britannia did not create the oak tree to see how she looked, as nature is said to have created Goethe. The ‘‘enmity” between oxygen and fluorine, which alone of all elements forms no compound with it, and drives it out of its stable union with hydrogen, to form ozone and hydrofluoric acid, might very conceivably suggest to one the hatred of Hannibal for the Romans, or the usurpation of Igraine by Uther Pendragon. In this way the one may always be said to symbolize the other. But psychoanalysis uses the term to mean much more than this; not only that the one idea has certain grounds for association by similarity with the other, but that it is ac- tually a genetic expression of the other. That is, one dreams that he is near the summit of a mountain, down which there flows a gushing waterfall; he is thirsty, but does not drink. It needs no highly-colored imagination to associate this episode with any deep-seated trend, wish, if you like, that has to be kept in the background, and even to dovetail minute features of the one into features of the other; but it is a very rash step further to say that these detailed features of the one are therefore genetically determined by the other. The fact of contiguity in free association is not sufficient to establish one event as symbolic of another in the sense of genetic expression. This is attested by the numerous symbolisms in which it is not possible that one should be the genetic expression of the other. Such instances as the above are supplemented by cases where differential sym- bolism is clearly marked. In Titian’s “Sacred and Pro- fane Love,” there is a good deal of naive disagreement as to which is which. Various snatches of music may become definitely associated in one’s mind with certain ideas, and one is often astonished on learning afterwards how different are the ideas conveyed in their original names. Is it not better to freely admit that we have no objective criterion of genetic expression in dream and much other 8 On Formulation in Psychoanalysis symbolism, but that the length to which one is willing to go in accepting such interpretations is a matter of personal equation? When, as Ernest Jones remarks, the chief character of the “Servant in the House” is called Alanson, the proposition that the name represents “son of man” is convincing to most of us; we should assume it without so much as inquiring whether such an idea was really present in the author of the play. Again, when I forget to bring away a five thousand ohm coil that I need, some of you would doubtless be inclined to regard this as determined in large part by a wish to get rid of some other species of “resistance.” Others would scarcely accept this view, and no objective grounds could be adduced for doing so. The most extreme cases of this nature are, perhaps, to be found in the analyses of the “free selection” of numbers. That it is possible, through various analytic sinuosities, to relate these choices to special trends in the individual, serves, of course, to discover the special trends, but should not be offered as proof that these trends were productive in the selection of the numbers involved. This brings us to the first of the two issues on the co- structive side; What is really brought out by these analyses, and how ought their findings to be stated so as to keep within the limits of scientific formulation? The dream, the asso- ciation experiment, the Symptomhandlungen, all lead, through the free association method that is the base of psychoanalytic technique, to very full understanding of the dynamics of the individual’s mental life. The same goal could probably be reached, by the same method, from any other mental start- ing point, but these seem to lie on very direct routes. For all that has been claimed for the psychoanalytic method teleologically, it is not necessary to suppose that a mental event was the symbol of its ex post facto association any more than it is rationally wise to do so. Analysis is con- cerned with* the discovery of trends and their genesis, and is in no way dependent upon the attachment of any special significance to something from which in free association these trends are more or less indirectly derived. The es- sential thing is that a was associated with h and then to r, which leads us further to know the existence of d; not that Frederic Lyman Wells 9 a a.s a. dream-phenomenon was the symbolic product of b, c or d, which it need be neither in theory nor fact. Thus, the second issue, of the precise criteria of sym- bolism., becomes of a less fundamental nature. The value of an association in determining a symbolism, depends upon the fixity and invariability of that association. Cat is a symbol for a certain animal, because it regularly represents to us that animal. If in the content of myths, dreams or schizophrenia, an object is represented performing func- tions unequivocally attached to another object, the first object may be regarded as symbolic of the second; the air, for example, as symbolic of the procreative principle. Some- times the Verstellung is very slight, so that the symbolism seems given directly to the content; as in Manson on page 8, or when a dreamed-of mountain, named Chickatoharie, appears as the fusion of Chickatawbut and Canajoharie. To these should, perhaps, be added the cases in which there is a certain immediate awareness of the Verstellung^ as in some phenomena described by Hollingworth. Such are the evidences by which symbolism is determined; it depends on one’s self how strong they must be before symbolism is ac- cepted as “convincing.” Last, and perhaps most important, are the issues in- volved in the psychoanalytic conception of sexuality. Few phases of these doctrines can have done more harm to their own cause or to the cause of truth. Where the function of science should be to delimit our concepts and give them clearer meanings, psychoanalysis has reduced this term to the level of an affective expression, deprived of every conno- tation that gives it a distinctive place in the language of realistic thinking. We are all familiar with the protests that arise against psychoanalysts assigning a sexual significance to so many human activities, and we are equally familiar with the answer — that we do not understand Freud’s conception of sexuality, and, anyway, we are simply making an exhibit of our cultivated resistances to a proper recognition of this factor. Now we have no objection to calling a spade a spade when it is impossible to call it a lily; but it is very perplexing when our colleagues employ the term to designate 10 On Formulation in Psychoanalysis clubs, hearts, diamonds and no trumps. Anaxagoras said that snow was black, challenging any one to disprove his assertion; and by quite similar process do you assert that the Wonnesaugen of the month-old infant is a ^‘sexual” reaction. Assuredly it is true that the numerous elementary activities which you have characterized in this way are determined by a unitary guiding principle; but is it on that or any account wise and just to call that principle sexual? By far the most fundamental point is never to lose sight of the relational implications of the term. It is im- possible to insist too strongly on this essential feature of its significance. The sexual character of an organism is given in a certain objective biological relation to other organisms. Sexual reactions primarily represent the functioning of these characters as such. And to meet a consistent criterion of sexuality, the reaction should conform to one of two condi- tions; it must be a reaction to an object of sexual character determined by the sexual character of that object; or second, it must be known as a symbol or derivative of such a re- action. What seems to have actually happened in the minds of those responsible for the dilution to infinity of the sexual concept, is that the word has become identified with and displaced the broader concept of the hedonic.^ Organisms tend, in the most multiform ways, to all sorts of activities that result in pleasure. ' These activities usually, but not necessarily, run parallel to those resulting in the objective advancement of the organism or its species; among human beings the conflict is particularly marked. We do not clearly know the role of the hedonic factor in determining the reaction, but natural selection would, of course, tend to the survival of those organisms in which the hedonic and beneficial factors were best combined. The essential thingfor us is the fundamental organic property of preserving those reactions which bring pleasure, and giving up those which do not. This is properly formulated in psychoanalysis as the Lustprinzip, or pleasure principle. To some extent, this principle doubtless determines reaction-trends consti- tutionally, as we know that co-ordinated series of responses may be inherited; to some extent it is, doubtless, also a proc- Frederic Lyman Wells 11 ess of trial and error adjustment. Human beings are physiologically so constituted that the great part of the elementary pleasures are derived through the stimulation and activity of various but rather definite areas, different portions of mucous surface, the alimentary canal, and the like. It is a great anticipatory misnomer to call these the “erogenous zones” in childhood; the erotic function, of such as develop one at all, is quite subsequent and secondary. Only from our knowledge that in the life history of the individual certain of these trends do later take on a sexual character, do we regressively irradiate this adjective over all of them, and because the child reacts upon the various pleasure areas rather unselectively, characterize a doubt- fully sexual disposition with the unhappy cacophemism of polymorph pervers. I should sooner apply the term to Freud’s conception of sexuality. What we have to start with are a number of possibilities for pleasurable reaction, between which a developmental selection takes place, and for the best of evolutionary reasons, those are the most likely to survive and flourish, which are involved with the reproductive instinct. But, of course, the underlying Lusttrieh of the organism may develop in various ways, with- out relation even to the genital areas, not to mention sex- uality. While a young boy is defecating in a field, a stray dog comes up and licks his posteriors. If the orgastic sensa- tions thus experienced lead to a repetition of this or allied practices described by the child Gargantua, there might well result a serious deviation from the normal development of the instinct trends, but it would furnish the last of reasons for being called a sexual reaction. Better indeed to term it an anti-sexual reaction, since it would inhibit and distort the normal development of the sexual instinct proper. Yet one should probably go further than this, and point out that the primary involvement of the genital tract is not of itself sufflcient to determine the sexual character of the reaction. Thus we do not regard every reaction as loco- motor because the foot takes part in it. Lamairesse makes mention somewhere of a Hindu priest who is represented gazing steadily at an image of the god Krshna, and, in the course of devotion, masturbates. Whether such a reaction 12 On Formulation in Psychoanalysis is to be regarded as sexual must depend upon the psychic factor; as a mere manifestation of religious ecstasy, it is no more sexual than, under like circumstances, are the tears and contortions of the mourners’ bench. Suppose a child isolated from birth from all human contacts, kept alive and cared for through wholly mechanical means; no more sexual significance could attach to his masturbation than to any other of his actions. The same may be observed with the stupors of profound idiocy, individuals of no traceable sex consciousness, in whom the process bears the aspect of the simplest of sensory-motor arcs, scarcely less automatic than the scratch-reflex of a spinal animal. Do you propose to dignify such activities with the name of sexual.^ We see, therefore, that quite independently of sexual trends, the hedonic reactions associated with the genital sphere are apt to assume primacy among their congeners. Under normal environment, this trend deepens and becomes predominantly responsive to individuals of opposite sex, occasionally also to the same, or to stimuli experientially associated with them. These reactions and those of all other areas take on a sexual character only as they are determined by the sexual character of the object; real or imaginary, actual or symbolic. Other phases of the under- lying Lusttrieh either fade into obscurity or are assimilated to sexual reactions (Partialtriehe); some preserve an inde- pendent existence, most notably the hedonic reactions associated with the taking of food, because of the equally fundamental character of this instinctive trend. We ought not to apply the term sexual to reactions for no better reason than that some time in the life history of the individual they may or may not become associated with specifically sexual trends. Psychogenesis, in the sexual sphere as elsewhere, is progressive, not retroactive. Possibly a useful temporary purpose has been served by extending the term to cover all phases of Lusttrieh, thus clearly pointing out the unitary character of the principle underlying them, but it is exceedingly unfortunate when such metonymies are thought of literally. For the formulation of such re- actions as regularly become subservient to the Sexualtrieh proper, or, if they do not do so, tend especially to block its Frederic Lyman Wells 13 proper development, we mdght maintain the indication of their most important relationship in the designation of para- sexual reactions. By definition, the Sexualtrieh should be directly or symbolically objectified, but it is not clear that the Objekt- trieh should be entirely included within it. Profound idiots at times seize the hand of a neighbor and masturbate themselves with it. The question is again how far the re- action is determined by the sexual character of the object. And the same criterion must apply along the range up to the whole group of sister-, cousin- and aunt-complexes, somie of them assuredly of sexual character. The principal word of constructive criticism in psycho- analysis is then. Look to your formulations! Let no one elude this issue with the idea that it is unim.portant as a mere matter of words. No phase of psychoanalysis is unim- portant that is an essential factor for its judgmient and appreciation as a department of science, and is, to-day, responsible for much of the negativistic attitude in those quarters from which the first encouragement should have come. Examine these theories of mental function squarely, and with the same freedom of resistance as is urged upon those who look to you for help. Has due care been exer- cised to keep the interpretation of your splendid body of observational data within the limits of what they really showed, or is it often subordinated to impressiveness of statement, with just a tinge of what we clinically know as the “desire to astonish”.^ Have you never said “Freud has discovered,” where he only surmised.^ The same loose- ness of formulation that, perhaps, facilitated their applica- bility to data of clinical observation, has unquestionably retarded their assimilation with the more rigid standards of experimental proof. In the correction of these conditions lies the best hope of mutually supportive progress.