The

PsychoanalyticMovementThe Cunning of Unreason

Ernest Gellner

Foreword by José Brunner

To Susan

The Psychoanalytic Movement

The

PsychoanalyticMovementThe Cunning of Unreason

Ernest Gellner

Foreword by José Brunner

© 1985, 1993 by Ernest Gellner; © 2003 by The Estate of the Late Ernest Gellner

350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5018, USA108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK550 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, AustraliaKurfürstendamm 57, 10707 Berlin, Germany

The right of Ernest Gellner to be identified as the Author of this Work has beenasserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in aretrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UKCopyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of thepublisher.

First edition published in Great Britain 1985 by PaladinSecond edition published 1993 by Fontana Press, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishersNorthwestern University Press edition published 1996 by arrangement withHarperCollins Publishers Ltd., LondonThird edition published 2003 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gellner, Ernest.The psychoanalytic movement : the cunning of unreason / Ernest Gellner ;foreword by José Brunner.– 3rd ed. p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-631-23413-6 (pbk : alk. paper)1. Psychoanalysis–History. 2. Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939. I. Title.BF173 .G382 2002150.19’5’09–dc21 2002007302

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Set in 10/12.5 Photinaby Ace FilmsettingPrinted and bound in the United Kingdomby MPG Books, Bodmin, Cornwall

For further information onBlackwell Publishing, visit our website:http://www.blackwellpublishing.com

Contents

Foreword by José Brunner xAcknowledgements xxxiIntroduction to the Second Edition xxxiii

1 Back to Nature 1Gibbon’s Problem 1Some Basic Facts and Questions 4The Last Angel 10The Harbinger of the Pays Reel 15The Battering-Ram 23

2 The Plague 27Give Us This Day 27Original Sin 31Pastoral Care 32The Click 34The Wager 35

3 The Pirandello Effect 39Free-Fall 39Inside and Out 44Transference (Greater Love Has No Man) 46Conceptual Deprivation 49The Terminal Valve 58The Implicit Promise 60

vi Foreword

4 On the Rack 65Licensed to Cure 65A State of Grace 69A Realist Theory of Knowledge 71Hire-purchase Stoicism 74From Adjustment to Identity 76The Errors of Realism 77

5 The Cunning Broker 85The Concept of the Unconscious 85Psycho-hydraulics 95A Cunning Bastard 97Reduction at the Service of Man (or, a Plethora of Omens) 100

6 Reality Regained 108An Emaciated World 108The Servicing of Reality 109A Habitable World 111The Bourgeois Dionysiac 116

7 The Embourgoisement of the Psyche 120The New Guardians 120Plato Up-ended 123Transvaluation of Values, to Customer Specification 125Socrates and the Cave 127

8 Anatomy of a Faith 130The Erring Husband and the Principle of Recursive

Cunning 130Brief Checklist and a Much Worse Murder 132Data and Theory 134Some Outside Comments 136The Trickster 141Freud and the Art of Daemon Maintenance 145Eternal Corrigibility 152

9 The Bounds of Science 156Testability 156Testability Vindicated? 161

vi Contents

Foreword vii

The Natural Transcendent 167Swichens 169The Three-horse Race 171Beast, Shaft and Test 173

10 La Thérapie Imaginaire 177Float and Sail 177Truth and Ideology 178The Well 180The Pineal Gland 182Captain of His Soul 186Conclusion 190

Appendix 194Notes 196Select Bibliography 205Index 207

Contents vii

To Susan

Aschenbach taught a whole grateful generation that a man can stillbe capable of great moral resolution even after he has plumbed thedepths of knowledge . . .

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

x Foreword

Foreword

José Brunner

This foreword does not provide a summary of The Psychoanalytic Move-ment, for this would mean doing a disservice to both author andreader. There is no need to simplify or explain what Gellner meant,for one can hardly think of a more lucid and sharp writer, with aunique style and an uncanny gift that enabled him to avoid high-falutin’ jargon, to come right to the point and present his positionwith clarity and wit, however complex it may be. Presenting Gellner’sviews in a shortened second-hand account would deprive the readerof the pleasure of his text, with its brilliant insights, sparkling asides,colourful puns and dramatic metaphors. Instead, this essay providesfive contexts for reading The Psychoanalytic Movement in order to drawattention to features of Gellner’s text that otherwise, perhaps, mightbe overlooked:

1. Although Gellner writes as an implacable critic of Freud, these twoostensibly different thinkers also shared similar origins and werekindred spirits. This emerges from a short biographical account ofboth Freud and Gellner, focusing on their common origins in Cen-tral Europe and the encompassing nature of their thinking andtheir writings.

2. Further significant affinities between Freud and Gellner becomeevident when The Psychoanalytic Movement is set in the context ofthe deep concern with rationality and the temptation of modernhumans to escape the burden of modernity, which was shared byboth thinkers. In addition, hitherto unpublished sources demon-

Foreword xi

strate that Gellner’s entire academic career was accompanied byan interest in psychoanalysis.

3. The Psychoanalytic Movement diverges in significant aspects fromthe scathingly hostile critiques that became fashionable during theso-called Freud Wars. While Gellner shares some of the militantspirit typical of Freud’s radical detractors, who have become knownas ‘Freud bashers’, The Psychoanalytic Movement is no writ of in-dictment and provides a sociological perspective that is absent fromthe works of the ‘Freud bashers’.

4. Gellner, rightly, makes much of the complex metaphorical con-struction of psychoanalytic discourse, especially of its fusion of hy-draulics and semantics. Gellner’s treatment of this cause-meaningmerger in Freud’s work is sociological rather than philosophicaland, in contrast to most other discussions, it is non-reductionist.

5. Gellner is a highly metaphorical writer and deploys a plethora ofimages to explain the logic and tenets of psychoanalysis, but thethree main repertoires of metaphors that he invokes for this pur-pose – of crime, politics and mythology – can be shown to havebeen crucial features of Freud’s own discourse.

The Fox as Hedgehog

Sigmund Freud was born on 6 May 1856 in the small town of Freibergin Moravia, which then belonged to the Hapsburg Empire, but todaybelongs to the Czech Republic. Most people living there were CatholicCzechs, but Jews like the Freuds tended to be German-speaking andsecular. In the wake of the business problems of Sigmund’s father, whowas a cloth merchant, the family moved briefly to Leipzig in 1859 andthen, a year later, to Vienna, the capital of the Austro-HungarianEmpire. This, of course, is the city with which Freud’s life and namehave remained associated ever since, for he lived there until after theAnschluss of Austria to Nazi Germany, when he was urged by friendsand followers to emigrate and given permission to do so by the Nazis.He left for London in May 1938, where he died on 23 September 1939at the age of 83, an émigré in Hampstead.

Ernest Gellner was born seven decades after Freud, on 9 December1925. Like Freud he grew up in a secular, Jewish, German-speakingCentral European family and spent the first years of his life in what by

xii Foreword

then was Czechoslovakia – though in Bohemia rather than Moravia.He grew up in Prague, a city that the Gellners left after the Germanoccupation in 1939, emigrating to England, as Freud and his daugh-ter had done. Though they spent a few months together in London –the Gellners lived at first in Highgate – the 13-year-old boy from Praguenever met the 83-year-old Viennese.

Gellner went to school at St Alban’s Country Grammar School forBoys, where some years later he won a scholarship to Balliol College,Oxford. During World War II he volunteered for the Czech ArmouredBrigade, returning to Balliol when the war was over to complete hisdegree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. A few years later he wentto Edinburgh as a lecturer in philosophy and then joined the sociologydepartment at the London School of Economics in 1949, while em-barking on his doctorate. He remained at the LSE for 35 years as lec-turer, reader, and then Professor of Philosophy with Special Referenceto Sociology in the Department of Sociology, transferring in 1969 tothe Department of Philosophy. In 1984 he moved to King’s College,Cambridge as William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology and be-came President of the Royal Anthropological Institute, retiring in 1992,when he became head of the newly founded Centre for the Study ofNationalism in the Central European University in Prague. On 5November 1995, shortly before his 70th birthday, Ernest Gellner diedin the city in which he grew up.

There are, then, some obvious similarities between the two men, butthere also are some important differences: Gellner was a loner, at leastin intellectual terms. A social anthropologist interested in politics, phi-losophy in general, and the philosophy of science in particular, he neverfounded or joined a clearly defined school of thought. Freud, in con-trast, was a doctor who treated patients, theorised about the mind andits disorders, invented a significant modern therapeutic technique, andestablished and led a guild of practitioners committed to some contro-versial beliefs and practices. In all these aspects the two thinkers mayhave been quite incompatible, but one can also imagine them as notall that unlike one another.

Professionally, neither of them really fitted into the framework inwhich they were trained. Freud started his career as a neurologist, butearly on he abandoned investigating the brain; neurologists hardly readhim and in so far as they did, they tended to oppose him. A similarstatement can be made about Gellner and the anthropologists. In the

Foreword xiii

beginning he did ethnographic fieldwork and got a PhD in social an-thropology, but although he was elected to the British Academy as ananthropologist, at the height of his career he no longer did any field-work and was not widely read by anthropologists – and in so far as hewas, they seemed to disagree with him.

In terms of their ethnic self-consciousness, neither Freud nor Gellnerhad much empathy for narrow Jewish concerns, though they notedthe impact of their Jewish roots on their outlook. Both of them were‘completely godless’ Jews, to use a term by which Freud described him-self.1 In terms of their Weltanschauung, too, one can find much similar-ity: both were passionate defenders of the Enlightenment legacy,polemically secular, courted controversy and sought to free humanityfrom deceptive and therefore detrimental systems of thought by radi-cal critiques. As theorists, both were model-builders: Freud inventedmodels of mental structures, forces and processes, Gellner of social struc-tures, large-scale historical developments, systems of thought andideologies. Both were marvellous rhetoricians: they had a way withwords and sought to convince their audiences with great aplomb, de-fending their respective views with the steadfastness and determina-tion characteristic of intellectual conquistadors, to use another notionFreud applied to himself.

Conquistadors they were, no doubt, though they sought to conquerdifferent terrains: Freud that of the mind’s elusive inner world andGellner that of practices in and theories of the external world. Freud’swritings include theoretical essays on hysteria, mourning and sexual-ity, as well as clinical guidelines, literary analyses, biographical com-ments on writers and quasi-literary texts. He wrote on dreams, earlychildhood, tribal societies, religion, war, the nature of civilisation, jokes,everyday occurrences such as forgetting, as well as Michelangelo’sstatue of Moses and Dostoevski’s character. A seventeenth-centurymanuscript on demonology could provide a topic for an essay, as wellas the memoirs of a mad German judge or the bizarre obsessions of ayoung lawyer who came to him to undergo analysis. What allowedFreud to transgress disciplinary boundaries in every way imaginableand to roam freely across academic domains was the fact that he hadone guiding concern, that he sought to promote a cause: to reveal thehidden workings of the unconscious in every aspect of life.

Gellner’s interpretation of psychoanalysis is only one small aspect ofan oeuvre that includes a seminal theory of nationalism as well as

xiv Foreword

sharply formulated attacks on Wittgenstein, analytic philosophy andOxford dons. He published an ethnographic and analytical study of thesegmentary political system of the Berbers of the Atlas mountains inMorocco (originally his doctoral dissertation), analyses of Malinowski,Weber and Durkheim, arguments against Marxism andpostmodernism, together with discussions of Muslim fundamentalism,Kant and Descartes. He sought to outline the structure of world his-tory, as it were, focusing on the role of productive technologies andculture. He provided a detailed study of the work of Soviet anthropolo-gists and, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he wrote on the inter-action of civil society and the state in Eastern Europe. Gellner’s workspans history, sociology, anthropology, politics and philosophy. Hisimpressive intellectual scope and virtuosity, too, can be explained byone underlying concern: to reveal the nuts and bolts of modern con-sciousness in order to highlight the necessary social foundations andvaluable socio-economic effects of impartial, systematic scientific think-ing.

In a widely quoted essay, Isaiah Berlin described as hedgehogs thosethinkers and writers who seem to stand still and examine the worldthrough one narrow and unitary perspective in terms of which theyexplain everything. In contrast, he calls foxes those who rush acrossdiverse fields and landscapes in many and contradictory directions,without any apparent aim.2 There is something misleading in this di-chotomy. It is often the case that those thinkers who move withoutrestraint among various disciplines and topics are able to do so not be-cause they lack a unifying principle or classification, as Berlin implies,but because they pursue an end or adopt a basic principle that servesthem as a compass, guiding them through the varied and difficult ter-rains that they seek to master. In other words, those who look like aim-less foxes from afar may well turn out to be hedgehogs when examinedfrom a closer range. Both Freud’s and Gellner’s extraordinary creativ-ity, it seems, arose precisely from this duality.

Modernity as Tragedy

Gellner achieved lasting fame mixed with some passing notoriety in1959, with the publication of Words and Things, a derisive attack onWittgensteinian linguistic philosophy.3 At the time, Wittgenstein was

Foreword xv

all the rage in Oxford. His relativist approach, which considers all cul-tures, social practices and thought systems as language games thatcan be assessed only according to their own internal criteria with nopossible objective, external procedures to adjudicate among them, wasbeyond doubt in philosophical circles. Gellner accused Wittgensteiniansof complacently reducing society to language, thus justifying intellec-tual aristocrats in playing trivial language games and dissecting thesocial world from their armchairs at the Oxford Colleges without everhaving to go out into the world they theorised about.

This was to be the beginning of a life-long campaign in the service ofwhat much later Gellner was to call ‘Enlightenment Rationalist Fun-damentalism’.4 In his words, this peculiar kind of fundamentalism‘desacralises, disestablishes, disenchants everything substantive: noprivileged facts, occasions, individuals, institutions or associations. Inother words, no miracles, no divine interventions and conjuring per-formances and press conferences, no saviours, no sacred churches orsacramental communities. All hypotheses are subject to scrutiny, allfacts open to novel interpretations, and all facts subject to symmetricallaws which preclude the miraculous, the sacred occasion, the intru-sion of the Other into the Mundane’.5 While this fundamentalism dif-fers from others in that it does not affirm any particular truth aboutthis or another world, its credo does absolutise orderly analytic proce-dures such as the systematic and unprejudiced collection of data andtheir breakup into constituent parts, the construction of consistent,universal explanatory theories and the impartial examination of factsby all possible theories, as well as the equally unbiased testing of alltheories by the facts available.

Gellner’s argument transcends epistemology or methodology. Henever restricted himself to the perspective of a philosopher of science;always also a moralist and a social theorist, he propounded a radicallyegalitarian cognitive ethic. In his words ‘All facts and all observers areequal.’6 Gellner re-stated this position in a number of his writings; thereis no doubt that it expresses one of his basic assumptions. It is predi-cated upon the postulate that it is objectively possible, in principle, todistinguish facts from values and truth from untruth, and that it mustbe possible, again, in principle, for all impartial and informed observ-ers alike to draw these distinctions. Moreover, Gellner’s cognitive ethicis supported by the socio-historical claim that cognitive egalitarianismforms the precondition of modern Western societies and that at least

xvi Foreword

potentially, it can be beneficial for all of humanity. He abhorred bothethical and historical relativism and had no doubt that insofar as thescientific revolution transformed the lives of people, it did so for thebetter. But he rarely ever discussed the traditional heroes of the Scien-tific Revolution, such as Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler and Newton. Hischampions were the philosophers and social theorists who propoundedthe modern analytic, universalist world-view, such as Descartes, Hume,Kant and Weber.

Gellner sought to understand progress and the forces that hinderedit. The attempt to explain the transition from the agrarian, religiousworld to the industrial scientific remained his most central concernand he attributed to modern thinkers no small part in it. Any readinessto privilege a particular field of knowledge, source of information orcommunity of scientific practitioners, any willingness to diverge fromthe straight and narrow path of universal, factual truth and rationaltheorising, meant for him to give in to temptation and to betray thelegacy of the Enlightenment.

Writing as a zealous guardian of Enlightenment thinking, he notonly sought to sketch its contours and underlying principles, but alsodevoted efforts to revealing the pitfalls of escape from the demands ofscientific rationalism into what he castigated as the illusory comfortsof lax and loose pseudo-scientific theorising. For him, the avenues ofescape were many and their enticement great, for they offered a warmhome in a cold, inhospitable world. But this offer was illusory and harm-ful, blinding those misled by it to the quest for scientific truth, whichfor Gellner constituted the only route to whatever welfare humanitycan hope for itself. Much of Gellner’s work was driven by the aim toexpose the fallacies and dangers inherent in the various attempts to re-enchant a world that had been disenchanted by the scientific mode ofthought. For this reason, and under the influence of the empiricist phi-losopher of science Karl Popper, he devoted his attention not only toWittgensteinian linguistic philosophy and hermeneutics, but also toMarxism, ethnomethodology and postmodernism.

This, of course, also is the angle from which he examined psychoa-nalysis. But though Gellner regarded Freud as an irrationalist in sci-entific clothing, the founder of psychoanalysis took himself for one ofthe true champions of scientific rationality. Even if Freud was not al-ways aware that the human predicament he dealt with was typicallymodern rather than universal, he clearly was conscious and proud

Foreword xvii

of the modern character of his theorising. In his Introductory Lectureshe portrayed psychoanalysis as part of the great subversive move-ment of science, designed to destroy the illusion that humanity formedthe apex of the universe. According to Freud, this decentring endeav-our had three heroes. It started with Copernicus, who taught peoplethat the earth was not the centre of the cosmos, continued with Dar-win, who displaced humans from the pinnacle of creation and turnedthem into descendants of animals. ‘But’ Freud added, ‘human mega-lomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow fromthe psychological research of the present time which seeks to proveto the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must con-tent itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciouslyin its mind.’7

Psychoanalysis not only offers a diagnosis of the predicament of hu-mans in modernity, it also promises them a remedy for it. As Gellnerstresses throughout his discussion of psychoanalysis, this promise andits medical rhetoric are its major attractions. But Freud abstained frommaking extravagant promises; in fact, he remained astonishingly mod-est for someone who put his theory on a par with those of Copernicusand Darwin. Even when offering help, Freud suggested that humansshould mistrust all promise of happiness. In his eyes, it was not theplan of the creation that humans should be happy, for according toFreud, ‘our possibilities of happiness are already restricted by our con-stitution’.8 Thus all he offered, in the words of his famous declarationat the close of Studies on Hysteria, was to transform hysteric misery intocommon unhappiness.9

Moreover, Freud warned that self-mastery could never be complete.Though one can hope to live with less suffering and repression, ac-cording to Freud no one will ever be completely without it. Thoughone can become more conscious of hidden intentions and impulses, noone will ever manage to become fully self-transparent and self-control-led. Though one’s thought and actions may become more rational, noone will ever be without irrational desires and fears. True self-knowl-edge, for Freud, is always also knowledge of its own limits. As a result,Freud’s discourse is marked by an irresolvable tension: on the one handpsychoanalysis aims at self-mastery and self-knowledge; on the other,it points to the mind’s uncontrollable and unknowable core, the un-conscious, and thus to the inevitable limits of self-mastery and self-knowledge.

xviii Foreword

Freud’s discovery of unconscious forces and meaning was by nomeans meant to be irrationalist; it was intended to fortify science andextend its rule over new areas of research, which, as Freud proclaimedin the last of his New Introductory Lectures, meant that ‘psycho-analy-sis has a special right to speak for the scientific Weltanschauung.’10 Themeaning of such utterances is by no means self-evident, however, forthey do not detail what Freud meant by the terms ‘science’ and ‘scien-tific’. Throughout his work Freud makes clear – implicitly in the man-ner of his investigation and theorising and explicitly in some of hisdeclarations – that for him science denotes a form of thinking that,though methodical, orderly and aiming at precision, always also in-volves metaphor, speculation, multidimensionality and, above all, akeen awareness of its lack of solace and its necessary imperfection. Sci-ence, he stated, ‘is not all-comprehensive, it is too incomplete and makesno claim to being self-contained and to the construction of systems’.11

Its evident incompleteness or imperfection was for Freud a crucial char-acteristic that differentiated science from philosophy and religion,whose illusory stability and coherence aimed to lull their believers intoa misleading sense of security.12

When one reads Freud’s Future of an Illusion, published in 1927, oneencounters an author who believes that he lives on the verge of an ageof reason, in which Enlightenment, however circumscribed, will cometo fruition.13 Even in 1933, the year in which Hitler came to power inGermany, Freud still expressed his hope ‘that intellect – the scientificspirit, reason – may in process of time establish a dictatorship in themental life of man. The nature of reason is a guarantee that afterwardsit will not fail to give man’s emotional impulses and what is determinedby them the position they deserve. But the common compulsion exer-cised by such a dominance of reason will prove to be the strongest unit-ing bond among men and lead the way to further unions’.14

Thus, the differences in outlook, subject matter and concern thatseparate Gellner from Freud should not prevent one from noting whatthey shared. Their theories may not be those of the classic Enlighten-ment thinkers, but their temperament was that of Aufklärer in the Eu-ropean tradition. Neither revolutionaries nor conservatives, they werereformist debunkers driven by suspicion of the human tendency to seekrefuge in soothing illusions, seeking to lay bare the difficult truth thatmodern humans seek to hide from themselves. They both argued thatafter the erosion of religion and feudal traditions the scientific mode of

Foreword xix

thought leaves modern humans no choice but to live in an indifferent,meaningless world. Nevertheless, neither of the two thinkers had anynostalgia for the cosy cocoons of faith and customary beliefs, nor dideither of them assume that it could be possible to slip back into the pro-tective, but also severely limiting shells of religious creeds and inher-ited social practices, once they have been broken by the liberating powerof scientific thinking. Both morally and factually, they maintained thatit was imperative for modern humans to make their own meaning,however difficult this may be. Thus Freud and Gellner shared a world-view that has a tragic touch to it, for they both believed that cognitivepower – i.e. science and Enlightenment – is gained at the expense ofhomelessness in the world.

Readers of The Psychoanalytic Movement will not encounter Freud ashe understood himself. Gellner’s Freud is not a tragic thinker concernedwith bringing Enlightenment to those in self-inflicted tutelage, he doesnot seek to drive home the tragic message that happiness is impossibleand that only reason and self-knowledge, however limited, can helphumanity to persevere, since endurance is the best one can hope for.Gellner is not impressed by Freud’s intentions. He judges psychoanaly-sis not by its founder’s self-understanding, but by what he perceives tobe the logic of its claims, its effects on Western culture and its practicalresults, and he does so from an empiricist perspective.

Rather than regarding psychoanalysis as a discipline that extendsthe mantle of science over the unconscious, as Freud proclaimed,Gellner sees the Freudian notion of the unconscious as a device thatdisplaces reason from its throne and provides an animist vision of themind as a realm ruled by cunning demons. Rather than having foundeda new community of scientists of the mind, Gellner castigates Freud forhaving established a Church-like secretive guild that self-righteouslypretends to have privileged access to the truth, while in fact adheringto a naturalist religion. Finally, Gellner portrays psychoanalytic prac-tice as authoritarian, providing mystical experiences and a secular formof pastoral care whose results cannot be falsified, rather than an em-pirically testable cure of mental ills. Gellner’s Freud is a man of vaguepromises, seductive theories and doubtful practices – but also of onegenuine contribution: a theory of the unconscious, however problem-atic it may be.

The discrepancy between the subjective intentions underlying thepsychoanalytic project of developing a scientific theory and therapeu-

xx Foreword

tic practice directed at the unconscious, and its objective – textual, prac-tical, institutional – manifestations is the main reason for which ThePsychoanalytic Movement was written. Gellner does not set out to de-bunk traditional religions. Both as an anthropologist and a philoso-pher he even has some respect for Muslim fundamentalism, for instance,despite his worries about its influence. His animus is directed againstmodern, naturalist, scientifically sounding belief systems that are butreligions in disguise, for their disguise makes them seductive and dan-gerous, tempting modern humans to seek refuge in their warm butdelusory embrace.

Preceding the first edition of The Psychoanalytic Movement in 1985,readers of Gellner’s published work did not encounter any significantreferences to Freud or psychoanalysis. Hence this book may have comeas a surprising digression from his usual concerns. But his private pa-pers indicate that psychoanalysis bore an almost life-long fascinationfor him. They contain, for instance, a letter from Masud Khan, writtenin the name of the London Institute of Psycho-Analysis in April 1954,giving Gellner library privileges at the Institute and thanking him forhis letter and a reference from Donald Winnicott, the eminent Britishpsychoanalyst.15 One wonders why Gellner bothered to contactWinnicott and what material he wanted to look at in the Institute thathe could not find in the library of the London School of Economics,where he taught at the time. There certainly was no reason for him toapply to the Institute’s library if all he wanted was to read Freud’s writ-ings or those of other psychoanalysts.

A clue can be found, perhaps, in another letter, written in December1956 to Gellner by Raymond Firth, who supervised his doctoral thesiswith Paul Stirling. It discusses Gellner’s plan to undertake a study of psy-choanalytic practice even before finishing his doctorate. Perhaps Gellnerhad sought access to the library of the Psycho-Analytic Institute in or-der to do some preliminary research on its papers? In any case, Firth ad-vised him to postpone any such undertaking until after he had completedhis thesis.16 Gellner’s private papers also contain unpublished, typednotes, dated January 1961, that already outline some of the argumentsthat were published two and a half decades later in The PsychoanalyticMovement.17 A few years later he seems to have returned to his originalplan and suggested to Winnicott to investigate the British Psycho-Analytical Society with the tools of anthropological field-work. In a let-ter from May 1966, Winnicott, at the time the President of the British

Foreword xxi

Psycho-Analytical Society, turned down Gellner’s proposal. Accordingto Winnicott, the council of the Society decided, instead, that it wouldorganise such an investigation at some undefined later time and that itwould lend its support only to a social scientist of its own choice.18 Al-most needless to say, the British Psycho-Analytical Society never didanything of the kind. This unpublished evidence suggests, however, thatfor a whole decade, from the mid-fifties to Winnicott’s negative reply in1966, Gellner played with the idea of undertaking an anthropologicalstudy of the British Psycho-Analytical Society.

Thus, The Psychoanalytic Movement appeared two decades afterGellner’s original project was blocked by Winnicott and, rather thanabandoning it, it seems that with the passing of time Gellner expandedthe scope of his interest in psychoanalysis. Despite its title, the bookdoes not trace the history of the psychoanalytic movement or of anyone of its schools of thought. By the middle of the eighties Gellner isonly marginally interested in psychoanalytic institutions of any kind.Instead, he examines psychoanalysis from a wider perspective, as thedominant idiom of industrial societies to speak about emotions. Thushe paints with a broad brush, identifying psychoanalysis more or lesswith Freud’s work, ignoring internal conflicts, national and culturaldivisions among psychoanalysts, as well as a whole century of devel-opments within the psychoanalytic movement.

After the publication of the book Gellner continued to publish minorpieces on psychoanalysis, addressing further aspects of Freud’s thoughtin a number of passages, essays, book reviews and prefaces, restatingsome of the arguments of his book as well as commenting on writingsof Freud that he had failed to discuss earlier, such as Civilization and itsDiscontents.19 Hence it is possible to say that Gellner’s critical interestin psychoanalysis parallels his sustained and comprehensive concernwith the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein – both lasted for four dec-ades, coming to an end only with his death, as is evinced by a book-length, posthumously published manuscript in which he renewed hisdiscussion of Wittgenstein.20 The reason for Gellner’s acerbic critiqueof the works of both Freud and Wittgenstein was his continuing worrythat their damaging ideas had cast a spell over the minds of the edu-cated Western public that inhibited rational, scientific thinking. ThePsychoanalytic Movement seeks to remove the Freudian spell, as it were,just as Words and Things tried to do with the Wittgensteinian spell,though there is a significant difference between his attitude to

xxii Foreword

Wittgensteinianism and psychoanalysis. According to Gellner, al-though Wittgenstein’s approach was misguided and misleading, it washistorically insignificant since it had currency with intellectualsonly. Hence it deserved simply to be unmasked on an academic level.Freud, in contrast, had invented a scientifically sounding but mystify-ing and unfalsifiable language for an important idea, the unconscious.Thus, Gellner’s primary aim with respect to psychoanalysis was tounmask its rhetoric as enchanting and obfuscating and reveal the hi-erarchical structure of its institutions and rituals, while accepting itscore belief as true. This is the purpose for which he set out to explainhow psychoanalysis had achieved an enormous success in conquer-ing the language of the emotions and personhood in the developedWest, far beyond cloistered intellectuals.

The Critic as Warrior

Gellner’s biting critique of the unfalsifiable seductiveness of the scien-tific claims of psychoanalysis, the authoritarian logic of its therapy,the emptiness of its promises, and the secretive behaviour of its practi-tioners can easily be mistaken for a slightly precocious example of ‘Freudbashing’ and read as one of the many condemning appraisals of psy-choanalysis that became fashionable in the nineties, though they wereby no means limited to that decade. Such critiques of Freud and hiswork were expressed in purposefully inflated and highly violent lan-guage, and tended to include ad hominem attacks on Freud. Hyperbolicrhetoric of this kind includes, for instance, Peter Medawar’s declara-tion that ‘psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectualconfidence trick of the twentieth century’, 21 Allan Esterson’s specula-tion that one day psychoanalysis may be seen ‘as one of the most ex-traordinary aberrations in the history of Western thought’,22 as wellas Frederick Crews’ allegation that ‘Freud has been the most overratedfigure in the entire history of science and medicine – one who wroughtimmense harm through the propagation of false etiologies, mistakendiagnoses and fruitless lines of inquiry’.23

Generally, Frederick Crews’ bellicose essay ‘The Unknown Freud’,published in November 1993 in the New York Review of Books, is consid-ered the opening salvo in what came to be known as the Freud Wars: ahighly charged polemic on the merits and shortcomings of psychoanaly-

Foreword xxiii

sis that for some time agitated the psychologically-minded in New Yorkand London, and their intellectual peripheries.24 Crews thrashed Freudfor having been a liar and fabricator rather than a theorist and thera-pist. A year later he did a follow-up with another, two-part essay, enti-tled ‘The Revenge of the Repressed’.25 The following years saw a series ofworks that were published by radical detractors of Freud.26 These de-bunking exercises were designed to show once and for all – but also againand again – that psychoanalysis was not only bunk, but also harmful.By associating in their titles Freud and psychoanalysis with exploitation,seduction, fraud, deceit, malignancy and victim blaming, these bookspaint a threatening picture of Freud and of psychoanalysis. In 1998Crews edited a compendium of critical essays under the title The Unau-thorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend. This collection contains anextract from The Psychoanalytic Movement.27 To some extent, this inclu-sion is justified, for Gellner wrote as a critic of Freud, but also as a war-rior – just as Freud wrote The Future of an Illusion not only as a critique ofreligion, but also as a declaration of war against it. The question, how-ever, is not whether one wages an intellectual war in one’s writings, buthow dirty one fights. And here lies the decisive difference between Gellnerand some of Freud’s more militant detractors.

Though Gellner is an unrelenting critic of psychoanalysis, he doesnot accuse Freud of knowingly distorting the truth, that is, of lyingand cheating. Though he depicts Freud as a thinker whose theoriesand practice contain unfalsifiable hypotheses, false promises and un-warranted conclusions, he does not, therefore, accuse Freud of being‘endlessly calculating’,28 pour scorn on a ‘notably willful and oppor-tunistic Freud’,29 or decry him as ‘fanatical, self-inflated, ruthless, my-opic, yet intricately devious’,30 as Crews does in his essays.

Moreover, there is a world of difference that separates Gellner’s ar-gument about the flimsy or non-existent evidence of therapeutic suc-cess from wild and unsubstantiated accusations that psychoanalyticpractice has ‘often fatal consequences’, such as was made by RaymondTallis.31 As unlikely as it may seem, Fuller Torrey even blamed the sev-eral hundred thousand mentally ill people among the homeless in theUnited States on the legacy of Freud – rather than on Reagan’s socialpolicies.32 The purpose of these scary allegations is not to explain psy-choanalysis as a social phenomenon as Gellner tries to do. ‘Freudbashers’ do not seek to understand psychoanalysis, but to inculpateFreud in crimes and misdemeanours of all kinds.

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Blaming and condemning Freud is easier without inquiring into thecultural and social dynamics underlying the rise and success of psy-choanalysis. Thus, Freud’s detractors provided rather weak accountsof the way in which Freud’s allegedly harmful lies are supposed to haveheld the educated middle class in the West under their spell for a wholecentury. In contrast to them, Gellner knows well that social practicesof any kind cannot be explained by the existence of texts that precededthem, for on its own a theory cannot come to dominate a culture andtranslate itself into a widespread social practice. Hence he provides anon-judgemental sociological explanation of the rise of psychoanaly-sis in the West. This dimension is entirely absent from the work of the‘Freud bashers’, for whom any attempt to explain Freud’s success byfactors other than the evil master’s deviousness would mean to dimin-ish the latter’s responsibility for current social and therapeutic ills.

Psychoanalysis as Fusion

As has been mentioned above, The Psychoanalytic Movement is a bilin-gual text. It uses the language of the social sciences as well as that ofphilosophy of science. In giving a socio-cultural account of the rise androle of psychoanalysis in the West, the book belongs in the company ofsocial and cultural studies of Freud’s oeuvre or of psychoanalytic dis-course in general.33 In criticising psychoanalysis for not living up toempiricist standards of science, Gellner joins many of Freud’s philo-sophical critics, from Popper to Grunbaum.34

Which of these two languages is more important? Gellner explainsthat ‘the central aim’ of the book is to specify how the structure of psy-choanalysis served the social and intellectual needs of humanity in theindustrial age.35 Moreover, when one disentangles the two languagesand examines each of them against their respective traditions, Gellner’ssociology of psychoanalysis and his anthropology of the consultingroom are by far more original and creative than his empiricist critiqueof psychoanalysis as a science. There is little new that Gellner adds toearlier philosophical critiques of this kind, such as Popper’s classic claimthat psychoanalysis is not a science since its claims cannot be falsifiedby empirical evidence.36 His argument with Adolf Grunbaum, whoclaims that psychoanalysis is falsifiable by empirical evidence and thathe falsified it, seems of minor importance.