Cassandra's Daughter: A History of Psychoanalysis

  • Joseph Schwartz
Penguin: 1999. 339 pp. £20, $20.95
Capitalizing on psychoanalysis: a psychoanalysing machine exhibited at an industrial show in 1931. Credit: CORBIS/BETTMANN

It is a brave man who attempts a history of psychoanalysis in 300 pages. The controversies are legendary, and most people already have an opinion and know something about the personalities involved. We need a history of psychoanalysis for the general reader, but I am afraid this is not it, even though it goes some of the way.

Joseph Schwartz brings Sigmund Freud to life: his early scientific struggles; his search for somewhere to make his mark; his early theories; and the collaboration with Josef Breuer which came unstuck. He deals with Freud's journey towards a workable method, the ‘analytic hour’. There is a long section on the vexed matter of the seduction theory and child sexual abuse. Schwartz leaves Freud the theoretician at about 1910 (and about one-third of the way through the book); the next two chapters describe the early splits with Alfred Adler and Carl Jung.

He then shifts to the United States with a fairly brief account of psychoanalysis there and a long and interesting discussion of the reforms in psychiatric institutions during the early decades of the century, specifically the work of William Alanson White and Harry Stack Sullivan. Most of the last third of the book deals with developments in Britain, beginning with Melanie Klein and child analysis, followed by a brief discussion of Jacques Lacan in France.

This is no potted history. Schwartz began as a physicist, and has become a practising psychotherapist via research into mental health. He is a staunch defender of psychoanalysis, and he handles the question of its scientific status, or otherwise, robustly. It is, he says, “a science in the sense that it attempts to understand human subjectivity in material terms”. In the final chapter he takes up the question of neuroscience and psychopharmacology, arguing that although drugs have their place in treatment, they do not replace psychoanalysis; “in the absence of a deeper understanding of mind–body connections, such pharmacological agents will always have a certain hit or miss quality to them”. Neither pharmacology nor psychoanalysis has a magic bullet. Schwartz believes that psychoanalysis is a serious business, and has no truck with dinner-table chatter. The psychoanalytic profession, not having been very good at defending itself, needs this kind of support.

As a scientist, Schwartz has his feet firmly on the ground. But there is another Schwartz who gives the impression of trying to ride two or more horses at once. The book is partial in both senses of the word. While there is no harm in this, provided it is made explicit, Schwartz's preferences are left to the reader to discern — although this is not too difficult. It is not until page 138 that he shows his hand: “This book could be said to be trying to position psychoanalysis as an extension of the Western scientific tradition as a way of understanding the human inner world”. But it is sub-titled A History of Psychoanalysis, and the result is an uncertainty of focus which leads one to wonder why he has chosen particular topics to expand on. Why so much on psychiatric reform in America? How does it relate to the book's purpose? The choice may appear arbitrary.

Two rather more serious problems are fairness and consistency. Like everyone else, Schwartz has his preferred theorists and they are those who emphasize the external over the internal; for instance, John Bowlby, Donald Winnicott and Heinz Kohut. This seems inconsistent, in view of his description of psychoanalysis as the attempt to “understand the structure and dynamics of the inner world of the experiencing human being”. In fact, the question of external and internal is not as simple as Schwartz suggests.

As for fairness, psychoanalysts have from the outset dealt with theoretical disagreements by accusing opponents of personal failings, sometimes verging on character assassination. Schwartz the scientist knows that the theory-maker's personality is irrelevant to the value of the theory, but Schwartz the polemicist cannot resist joining in the fun. Melanie Klein is in danger of emerging as a difficult woman who had some important ideas about children but paid little attention to the outside world. This fails to do justice by a long way to the depth of her ideas, for instance her formulation of the paranoid and depressive positions, which provides psychological grounds for some fundamental questions of society and politics, and their subsequent development by others. By Wilfrid Bion, for example, regarded by many as the most profound psychoanalytic thinker since Freud, but who gets just one mention — in a chapter note.

One must not be unjust to the opposition. To give one example, Joan Riviere was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Klein. She was also a rather conflicted woman and she went into analysis with Ernest Jones, himself an equivocal character, who seems to have behaved quite unprofessionally towards her. Jones finally sent her to Freud, who repaired some of the damage and wrote in forthright terms to Jones about his conduct. Schwartz mentions that Riviere translated some of Freud's papers, but fails to mention that she wrote a number of her own, including one on the clinical problems of narcissism which has become a classic. As a result she emerges as a rather neurotic lady but not as the significant figure she was.

To return to Schwartz's declared purpose, psychoanalysis does indeed have a place in twentieth-century Western tradition, and in his view it is a high destiny. This approach can easily lead to some rather large statements, such as “psychoanalysis has been charged not with participating in the glory of the Industrial Revolution but with clearing up the mess it left behind”. One can nod in agreement, or one can take it with a pinch of salt, but this sort of thing is risky, as another example, which may raise some eyebrows this side of the Atlantic, shows — “He went to Cambridge in 1925, then at the height of its fame in natural sciences”.

This could have been a truly well-argued book if Schwartz the scientist had kept a better hold on the other Schwartz. As it is, anyone reading it will certainly learn something about psychoanalysis, and may be stimulated to read further. There is still a book to be written about the development of psychoanalytic thinking and practice which steers clear of the personal. It will be longer and will not be such a racy read.