Misunderstanding Freud
Written by Arnold Goldberg, MD

Interviewed by Jeffrey Stern, PhD

Jeffrey Stern's Interview with Arnold Goldberg upon the publication of Misunderstanding Freud - Saturday, November 20, 2004.

Stern: How did you come to write Misunderstanding Freud, and what is the significance of its improbable title?

Goldberg: In thinking about it, I realize I've never really written a book. I write a bunch of papers periodically and after awhile I realize they have a common theme. And then I put them together into a book. And I've often been amazed that people can sit down and write a book from beginning to end, you know, with one idea, and I don't think I ever could be capable of that. So there are various papers that I have written over a period of time, and then at a certain point I think, gee, they all hang together in a particular way, and then I try to put them together and develop some continuity from chapter to chapter so that there is a sense of a whole, and sometimes I succeed and sometimes I don't. I don't know if I succeeded with this book. The title probably came from a lot of reading I was doing of Gadamer about understanding and misunderstanding, and its designed to be ambiguous. I think I say at the beginning that "misunderstanding" could be an adjective about Freud, that he was a misunderstanding person, like Curious George, but it also suggests that most people misunderstand Freud, that is, that the act of reading Freud leads to misunderstanding. Anyway, my son told me it was the only good title I ever thought of, and he thought the title alone might sell the book.

Stern: The Prison House of Psychoanalysis is a pretty good title.

Goldberg: But I stole that from Nietzche.

Stern: Well, yes. And from Fredric Jameson. And this book seems to continue in the vein of The Prisonhouse with its interest in philosophy. You are especially concerned with Heidegger throughout and actually include a chapter in the appendix on Heidegger and Kohut - an "odd couple" as you call them who never knew one another, but nonetheless seem to you to belong together. How did Heidegger come to figure in your thinking?

Goldberg: Well, as you know, I took a class at the University of Chicago on Heidegger and Psychoanalysis with Jonathan Lear and Irad Kimhi and got very intrigued with Heidegger and read some Heidegger and an awful lot of books about Heidegger. And I thought there was an affinity there with everything that was in self-psychology. There have been a lot of people who are interested in self-psychology who are also interested in philosophy, and I think they've gone in a totally different direction than I have and, you know, I think it's up to the reader to decide which is more fruitful. But I thought Heidegger and the whole concept of openness to the world and being in the world is connected to self-psychology, because self psychology clearly refuses to demarcate an individual as separate, distinct and disconnected, and the whole point of being in the world is that you are always at one with the world. All the other psychoanalytic concepts, I think, have to do with the self as distinct from others, as separate from others, as an entity with clear borders, etc., etc. And Kohut in talking about selfobjects got away from that idea in a manner that I think catches the spirit of Heidegger's ideas. Now I'm no expert in Heidegger, but he meant a lot to me. That's all I can say.

Stern: To come back for a second to the title - if you were to write a book with a title beginning with the word Misunderstanding, anybody would think it would be Misunderstanding Kohut, or maybe Misunderstanding Self-Psychology. How did it become Misunderstanding Freud?

Goldberg: One of the things that was characteristic of Kohut was that he loved to take exception to what other people thought. He'd go around a table at a conference and ask everyone to give his opinion about whatever was in question. And Heinz would say, "interesting that I don't see it the way anyone else does." It's that routine. And that's very characteristic of his disagreement with Hartman, who was his friend. Hartman had this thing about insisting that psychoanalysis be a science of explanation. And I remember when Kohut talked to us about Hartman's article, which I talk about in the book, and how Kohut felt that psychoanalysis was an understanding psychology that later was explained. Kohut always wanted to take issue with Hartman about that. And then I just went a little further than Heinz, in saying that, well, if psychoanalysis is an understanding psychology, then the best explanation of understanding is offered by Gadamer, who says that we move all the time from misunderstanding to understanding to misunderstanding in a kind of a sequence. That is the process of an understanding psychology: that it always has to begin with a misunderstanding that reaches understanding. And then I realized that I could put the whole book together around that idea.

Stern: You say that interpretation is the lynchpin of that sequence.

Goldberg: Yes, well that too is derived from the philosophers Heidegger and Gadamer and the whole concept of the interpretive process, which I don't think psychoanalysts really understood because for a long time, psychoanalytic interpretation had a kind of foundation, which was that you interpret to the oedipal conflict. And then when analysts got more interested in pre-oedipal and then with other than oedipal issues, the rug seems to have been pulled out from under that foundation and people wondered when and how interpretation ends? And if you read, again, Heidegger and followers of Heidegger, you realize that interpretation is an endless process. That you're always dealing with things that are somewhat clearer, somewhat more understandable, and you have to continue on until you settle for a moment in relative comfort. But you have to recognize that such a moment is never definitive, that interpretation is endless. There's that wonderful I think William James story about his giving a class or a lecture and a woman raises her hand and says, "you know, I think you are all wrong about the earth and the celestial system." And he says, "what do you mean?" And she says, "everyone knows that the earth rests on the back of a frog." And he says, "oh, and what does that frog rest on?" And she says, "you're not going to get me Mr. James. It's frogs all the way down." And that was the same thing as interpretation. It's interpretation all the way down. You can also do that with toads, I think.

Stern: Turtles.

Goldberg: Oh, is it turtles?

Stern: I think it's turtles.

Goldberg: It is turtles. You're right, right. A monster turtle.

Stern: Right.

Goldberg: On the back of a monster turtle.

Stern: It's probably from some mythology.

Goldberg: Turtles all the way.

Stern: Anyway, the book is greatly concerned with the lure for psychoanalysis of what might be called interventions of non-interpretation, or as some might prefer it, interventions that are beyond interpretation. These include neurobiology on the one hand and relational therapies on the other. Why do you think it's so difficult for psychoanalysts to stick, as it were, to their interpretative knitting?

Goldberg: Well, for one, it's the seduction of foundations. You know, a final resting place. This is the answer, this is what it's all based on. You know, like physicists are always searching for the unified theory that will explain everything. And moralists are always searching for the set of principles that will determine how we should behave in every situation. And one of the more interesting, somewhat more recent developments that follows from interpretation and hermeneutics and its endlessness is the corollary idea that there are no foundations, and that you're not going to finally settle down and know this or that for sure.

Stern: It's turtles all the way down.

Goldberg: Turtles all the way down. And neurology is so beautifully seductive because the act delivers a promise there is an answer, there is a final resting place: it's all in Broca Area or Area 22 of the hippocampus or the ventral tegmentum or whatever, and we breathe a sigh of relief at last and say we know where the answer lies. But when you deal with a hermeneutic discipline, you realize that it's subject to various takes, perspectives and nuances of interpretation. And the whole problem between the conflict about the mind and the brain, of course, is that the brain has a final answer and the mind has multiple realizations. And that's one of the struggles that all philosophers have, you know, that the mind is multiply realized.

Stern: Is the neurological promise the idea that because it is increasingly possible with PET scans or other tests to isolate malfunctioning areas of the brain and to see such malfunctions as the cause of whatever emotional distress a patient might be suffering that such distress might be eliminated by attacking the malfunctioning brain pharmacologically or otherwise? In other words, is the promise that by healing the malfunctioning brain, the malfunctioning mind might be healed without ever needing to ask a patient what is going on within that mind, without ever asking him, that is, what he's thinking?

Goldberg: Well, the interesting thing was your word "eliminate," since one of the thrusts of the enhanced interest in neuroscience is, of course, it goes under the name eliminative materialism, which is a reductionism, which says essentially that we can reduce all mind activities into brain activities and therefore eliminate the whole problem of the mind and just talk about the brain. And that's one of the lures of neuroscience, that we won't have to worry about the fuzziness that occurs when we talk about the mind. And I think that it's very important that psychology recognize the value of the neurosciences without losing itself in the neurosciences. And I think many of the psychoanalysts who are now interested in the neurosciences don't realize that they are losing touch with psychoanalysis. And you see this in a lot of different activities that are going on in today's analysis: the concept of procedural memory pretty much eliminates talking in favor of some kind of nonverbal action which then quickly leads to ideas about attachment periods which are again nonverbal and then slowly slips into claims that it's all neurological and it's all the brain. And I think that's unfortunate because such claims reduce psychoanalysis and psychology to the neurosciences. I think reductionism is a terribly seductive and false siren in our present day view.

Now, on the other point, relational activities. Of course they're helpful for many patients, and many therapists feel stymied by the interpretative process and think something like the force of their person and therefore their relationship with the patient will be curative. There's a big and popular faction that says patients get better by virtue of the relationship. And I'm not saying this doesn't happen, but that it's a departure from psychoanalysis which is constituted by interpretive activity and understanding rather than by some sort of quasi-mystical exchange that goes on between people. The problem I have with the relational approach is that in some hands at least it tends to lose touch with the whole concept of the unconscious. It says rather that observable social phenomena are what get people better. Now again, I'm not saying that the concept of the unconscious doesn't need to be brought up to date and rethought in many ways but there's a danger in the sirens of neuroscience as well as in those of the relational perspective.

Stern: In one chapter you liken the brain to a television and the mind to what's "on". For a neurologist the problem with what's "on" has nothing to do with flaws in shows but flaws with the set. If the set is working whatever show is dialed up will run without a hitch. Trying to fix the set by discussing the content of a particular show would be absurd. But for such a person, that is, for a neurologist, that's what we therapists do, we try to fix the brain by treating the mind. Doesn't it make more sense simply to fix the set?

Goldberg: You sound like a good pharmacologist. Well, we have a lot of drugs that can make many people feel better. But psychoanalysis, especially self-psychology, is about living and if your brain is intact, you still need to have a life. And that's why these are two different universes of discourse, the talking, experiencing mind is not the same as the working brain. There are people who just don't seem to do very well with any kind of medication. People come in with a marital problem, for instance. You can medicate the bejesus out of them and they're still not getting along with their wife. People come in with a moral problem, you know, "I'm a thief", or "I'm a liar", or "I'm unfaithful", and you can medicate the hell out of them, and they don't seem to straighten up and fly right either. So I think that it's not wise presently to conflate the personal discomfort with healthy psychology.

Stern: You seem to be suggesting that some people suffer because they can't properly make sense of their world, that their unhappiness is not the result of a chemical imbalance, but because they somehow fundamentally misunderstand what they need to understand about themselves and others if they are to flourish.

Goldberg: Yes, because psychoanalysis, as I said, is about living. And it's not just about feeling good. You can feel good and not have much of a life. You can have a very complicated, rich life and have a lot of emotional struggle accompanying it. And just to say that all we're trying to do is remove the emotional struggle I think misses much of what psychoanalytic activity should be involved with. Living is much more multi-layered than just that.

Stern: It seems to me the book is, what? - sort of joyful about the very things that the dualists fear. I mean the book seems a kind of brief for immersion in the world, a kind of unbroken experience of thought and action and feeling and there's - you seem to have a sort of deep hopefulness and pleasure in this.

Goldberg: Well I'm very glad to think you got all that out of it.

Stern: It seems to me that you're saying that in a proper psychoanalysis there is no divide between living and thoughtfulness about living, that there isn't an outside from which to observe either for analyst or analysand, that it's all a kind of seamless activity. And I think you see psychoanalysis as potentially deeply authentic in a manner similar to the way Heidegger understands authenticity, but also enormously provocative of anxiety.

Goldberg: We had a class once where they were talking about Heidegger's position that no one could die for you. No one could die your death for you. Do you remember?

Stern: Yes.

Goldberg: And Irad (Kimhi) and Jonathan (Lear) kept on back and forth and back and forth with it, and what they were struggling with was something like can anyone end it for you. And of course the point is that its your life and only you can end it, and only you can finish it and complete it, and therefore it's always an ongoing, and never to be discovered end. And you're absolutely right that the same theme of opening and endless interpretation and continual discovery runs through the book and all through that philosophy and all through what should be psychoanalysis - which, a famous analyst likened to running a garden rake over the top of the sand at the beach. We don't do much more than move a few things on the surface, and this has caused a great deal of unhappiness in colleagues who are distressed by that lack of closure, that inability to know for sure. To some extent we all yearn for solid foundations, but analysis just isn't going to provide them. As a corollary to this, of course, is the concept of pluralism, which is very much what the book is about. We so are yearning for overarching theories that will explain everything that we tend to treat every new idea as something that will sooner or later be incorporated into some bigger idea that will eliminate it, until the day comes when we finally get one big theory that will cover everything. What's happening in today's psychoanalysis is both an interesting example of pluralism and an unfortunate example of pluralism, because it seems to be the case that different approaches to patients seem to help, and some approaches help some patients more than others. It also seems to be the case that most people use just one or two approaches and insist on kind of forcing the patient into fitting their particular approach. And it's also true that most people who use one or two approaches don't learn the other approaches, so we know that people who really know Kohut don't know Lacan or Bion, people who really know Lacan don't know interpersonal theory, etc., etc. Everyone does their thing and they of course will have a certain amount of success and a certain amount of failure because there is no one theory that covers it all in our particular field at this time, and it seems to be true of most fields at most times, because overarching umbrella theories just don't seem to work. So until we learn what works best for one patient, we're always going to be having these little arguments between us and not going to be able to pick out which patient would do well with a Lacannian approach, or which patient would do well with a Kohutian approach, etc., etc. We simply are unable to make those distinctions right now. The unfortunate part is that there is a kind of over-fertilization in terms of pluralism.

We used to have self-psychology conferences where we would consider one new idea in addition to what was called "classical" self-psychology. Then there developed intersubjectivity theory and then the theory of optimal gratification and on and on. At the last self-psychology conference they supposedly presented a case with five different ways of looking at the material and then someone just yesterday told me that the five now has become eight. And so obviously there is going to be an unending expansion of what should be careful and distinct ways of doing things. And I'm sure that if one of these eight would develop their own conference, they would spawn five more ways of doing what they're doing. It's like an unending expansion. New idea after new idea after new idea. And the trouble is that most of these aren't new ideas. They're new names and they derive from personal narcissism, you know, "I want to have my theory, it's not the same as your theory." So we struggle then with one, being able to find out what are valuable ideas, and two, allowing them to live in harmony with other valuable ideas.

Stern: I guess I'm wondering if in this sort of rapid expansion of theoretical approaches there isn't something else going on. Is it possible that the development of theory after theory after theory is borne of the same impulse to find some sort of final answer you've been speaking of? In other words might theory-making fall under the shadow of the impulse to end rather than to extend the anxiety provoking dialectic of misunderstanding, understanding, and interpretation?

Goldberg: Well, I am sometimes in correspondence with a philosopher named Peter Monk in Australia, who is a follower of Carl Popper, and who is a very interesting guy. He says that knowledge is Darwinian, and I think he would say that what we're seeing now in psychoanalysis with all of the different varieties of ideas is what we see in the natural world with birds or beetles or ferns. The various psychoanalytic ideas are going to be tested in the marketplace, and we're going to see what survives. I certainly think what we're living in now is a period of a multitude of minor variations.

Stern: Well, is there a possibility that this is how it has to be? As you were talking about evolution and different species, I was thinking about the evolution of language. And there are thousands of them, and they all do more or less the same thing. I mean, they make it possible for people to talk to each other and obviously in some languages different things are privileged - like words for snow and ice for the Inuit - but they all get the job done, even if its true that they get it done best for the populations that generate them. Now, it seems to me one might say that psychoanalysis - like language - is largely a local phenomenon, because psychoanalysts, unlike, say, academics, who often have the chance to spend long periods of time in a variety of communities, tend for the most part to stay in one place. So different psychoanalytic theories appear in different communities all the time. If this seems true, is it possible to think that the problem of having too many theories is not crucially that some don't really make a difference, or that we aren't fluent in enough of them, but rather that we fail to use whatever theories we are fluent in a truly open-hearted and enduringly questioning way?

Goldberg: Well, here's the argument against that. It's a good analogy, the idea of languages, but it fails because the whole point of the Darwinian development of ideas has to do with the Darwinian thesis that at a certain point maladaption occurs. And when maladaption occurs the mutant that by chance develops is better adapted. So too should it be with treating patients. When you're treating patients and you are always successful, there's no reason in the world to learn another theory. The only reason to learn something new is that you think you don't know what you're doing, that whatever you're doing isn't working. That's why Marian Tolpin said we should really only be talking about our failures. That's the only way we're going to learn anything, when something doesn't work. And so we assume that Melanie Klein developed her ideas because she was seeing a different kind of patient. She was seeing kids, and her ideas about adults didn't seem to work with kids. The same with Bion. He saw a lot of groups. The same with Kohut. He saw people and thought his use of classical Freudian theory wasn't working. So that's the whole point: if it works, it works. But when it fails, when it doesn't work, then a new configuration should arise. And that's what is tripping up psychoanalysis all the time. We seem to have failed to recognize where we have failed. Most of the time when you present, for instance, self-psychological ideas to classical Freudians, they mainly argue. They don't say, gee, that might work with case such-and-such that I didn't think about. And that's the biggest failing in psychoanalysis. We are not open to, "oops this isn't working out, I'm going to try something new." We become too wedded to our ideas.

Stern: I wonder if we could move away from the book for a moment to consider your thoughts on the fate of self-psychology over the years given your enormously central place in its history.

Goldberg: Oh, I don't think I'm capable of answering that. I can answer it in part in that I thought we should all take self-psychology as far as it could go, and I've always bemoaned the fact that people insisted on developing their own particular, not very interesting or exciting, deviations from self-psychology. But this sort of thing has got to happen, so you've got to put up with it. Anyway, I thought we should all take self-psychology's ideas as far as they could go, and as we did so we could also pay attention to what it meant to have a new idea develop in a science. That's an interesting kind of anthropological and sociological inquiry, you know, what happens to new ideas - how they're fought against, how they're watered down, how they're slowly absorbed and changed and ultimately become divorced from their founder. And what I naturally came to see is that with an anti-foundationalist, with a pluralistic, point of view and with anopenness to all the varieties of experience, life appears just loaded with ambiguities. There's no set course for anything and whenever you think, "now I've got it down, now for a certainty," you have to be like Wittgenstein, who said its necessary to be very cautious of certainty, because we are always repairing our boat in the middle of the sea. You can't pull into port and change it and go back out again. You're always in the middle of working, working, working. And it really makes for a very exciting kind of existence. You know it's not like you're selling the same product over and over again. Every time you go to a shelf it's a new product. By the way, I think that's what makes psychiatry and psychoanalysis so interesting, that it is a very fluid, open concept. And I've often told residents who want to go into orthopedics or internal medicine, you better watch it because they become quickly boring. And the thing about psychoanalysis and psychiatry is it's never boring because there's so many different stories, and if you're interested in narratives and stories and people, every day is something new and different. I continually try to fashion my thinking to the unending openness of this field - its never closing down.

Stern: Now that Misunderstanding Freud is out and on the shelves, what are you planning to write about next?

Goldberg: What I'm doing now is reading and writing about something that you and I have talked about which are the foundational moral and ethical principles that have crept into psychoanalysis without our ever thinking about them. You know, people who say absolutely everything in psychoanalysis is confidential are laying down a principle without questioning it, and if you really think about it, it's just not true. There's a lot that's not confidential and should not be confidential. People think absolutely everything in psychoanalysis, in psychiatry, and psychology must be an object of truth and honesty. Well, that's not quite the case either. We lie all the time. And we've got to lie a lot. And we're not always honest with patients. What one person called "moral sainthood" has crept into psychoanalysis - the idea that we hold ourselves up as some kind of gods who are honest and truthful and private and faithful and only want to help, and we are absolutely not understanding the fact that we are sometimes liars, sometimes gossipers, sometimes cheats, sometimes all these things that make us human and that we deny. And we're not going to be good analysts unless we come to grips with those kinds of personal failings that we have. So again, it's part of this general project of don't be so sure, life is loaded with ambiguities.

Stern: To sum up then, you seem to be saying that if we have the courage to face our failings, both within our work with our patients and within ourselves, if we are open to what we may not want to see, we will get to some place new, someplace better than where we've been.

Goldberg: Yes.

Stern: If we have the courage there is something wonderful.

Goldberg: The wonderful thing is openness to the world.

Stern: Yes.

Goldberg: And the thing to avoid is closing.

Stern: I think its fair to say that Misunderstanding Freud enacts the sort of openness you're describing, celebrates what I'd be inclined to call the generativity of not knowing.

Goldberg: My brother-in-law was taking my nephew for a walk and trying to explain to him the resurrection of Christ, how they buried him, and they looked in the cave and it was empty, and then three days later Christ appeared. And Dick said the only explanations were either that Jesus was truly reborn, or that someone had taken the body out, or that he had never been killed in the first place. And my little nephew, I don't know how old Sam was, looked up at Dick and said, are there any other options? And that's what I think we really ought to always be thinking about in this field.

Stern: Thank you Dr. Goldberg.

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