I Still Dream of Orgonon: Notes on the Strange Life and Times of Wilhelm Reich (Part 1: The European Years)

Wilhem Reich (1897-1957)

Photo possibly by A. A. Brill (c. 1922)

 

Once we open up to the flow of energy within our body, 

we can also open up to the flow of energy in the universe.

I. Opening Remarks

 

I could have featured Reich in my recent series on the grand perverts of Austria, but decided that he is such a unique figure that he deserves a post in his own right. 

 

I'm not, however, very familiar with his work: I once read an English translation of Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus  (1933) [1] and a funny little book entitled Listen, Little Man! (1948), in which he outlined his political philosophy (an idiosyncratic form of libertarian socialism). 

 

Mostly I know of Reich due to the fact that he's mentioned with admiration by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1983) [2]. 

 

That, and the fact that Kate Bush once wrote a song inspired by him [3].

 

 

II. The European Years

 

Wilhelm Reich was born in 1897, in Dobzau, Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but now in western Ukraine and awaiting the arrival of Russian bombs and soldiers. 

 

Although both his parents were Jewish, Wilhelm was brought up to speak only German and punished for using Yiddish expressions, or playing with the local Yiddish-speaking children. Oy vey! 

 

Wilhelm was homeschooled until the age of twelve. But when his mother was discovered having an affair with his live-in tutor and soon afterwards committed suicide, he was sent off to an all boys' school. Reich would later write about these events in his first published paper, detailing his shame and guilt, but also expressing his own incestuous fantasies involving his mother.

 

After the War, in which he served on the Italian front, Reich headed for Vienna, where he enrolled in law at the University. However, he found the subject tedious and so switched to medicine. Although he found this much more to his liking, he rejected the mechanistic concept of life which then dominated in favour of a more vitalist philosophy.

 

In 1919, he had a fateful first meeting with Freud, from whom he had requested a reading list for a seminar on sexology. Interestingly, it seems they left an equally strong impression on one another and Freud smoothed the younger man's way into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and encouraged him to start meeting with patients of his own; one of whom, 19-year-old Lore Kahn, he was soon fucking, even though Freud had advised not to get romantically involved with patients.

 

Sadly, she became seriously ill and died shortly after the affair with Reich began [4]. Swiftly putting his grief to one side, he then seduced another patient, Annie Pink - an 18-year-old medical student and friend of Frl. Kahn's - though he did eventually do the decent thing and marry her, at the insistence of her father, and she went on to become a well-known shrink in her own right.    

 

Despite what would now be regarded as gross professional misconduct (at the very least), Reich was apppointed deputy director of Freud's outpatient clinic and he worked there until 1930, forming his own theories on human psychology to do with repetitive patterns of behaviour, speech, and physical posture serving as ego defence mechanisms, or what he termed character armour.     

 

Reich was highly regarded by his contemporaries and colleagues at this time and many found his lectures and seminars spellbinding. His first book was also well received and won him further professional recognition, including from Freud, who in 1927 arranged for his appointment to the executive committee of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.   

 

Thus, everything was coming up Rosen for Reich and he seemed to have a bright future ahead; despite one of his early patients protesting that Reich was, in fact, a psychopath; and despite the fact that Freud was increasingly concerned about the theory that psychic health depended upon the full discharge of libidinal energy. 

 

Such ideas, tolerated at first within the psychoanalytic community, would later be ridiculed. And when Reich tried to reconcile his new theories with Marxism, he would increasingly be regarded as part sexual revolutionary and part sexual lunatic (although, to be fair, he was certainly not the only intellectual attempting to marry psychoanalysis and Marxism at this time).     

 

In 1927, Reich opened half-a-dozen Sex-Pol clinics in Vienna, where members of the proletariat could receive free psychoanalysis, political instruction, and contraceptives. These proved so popular that Reich also took to the streets in a mobile clinic and began distributing sex-education pamphlets door to door.

 

This same year also saw publication of Die Funktion des Orgasmus, which he dedicated to Freud. Unfortunately, the latter was not overly impressed and took two months before sending a short thank you note (which didn't go down too well with Reich). Freud's view, essentially, was that it was an oversimplification to view everything in terms of orgastic potency.   

 

In 1930, Reich and his wife moved to Berlin, where he continued his work and set up more Sex-Pol clinics. Although he joined the German Communist Party, his new comrades were troubled by his promotion of sexual freedom for everybody - including adolescents - and they eventually refused to publish his material. 

 

And so Reich discovered that moral puritanism belongs as much on the radical left as the reactionary right. 

 

Having said that, it was the Nazis who, in 1933, most vociferously attacked his work and forced him to flee Germany with his mistress, a dancer called Elsa Lindenberg. The couple initially retreated to Vienna, then moved to Denmark, Sweden, and finally settled in Norway, where he and Lindenberg were to remain for five years [5].

 

It was whilst in Oslo, that Reich attempted to ground his orgasm theory in biology, exploring whether the libido was in fact a form of bio-electricity or a chemical substance [6]. These investigations led on to his bion experiments, where he played Dr. Frankenstein and sought to create rudimentary new forms of life (and explain the origin of cancer). 

 

Unsurprisingly, many within the scientific community in Norway expressed their scepticism regarding Reich's work. Whilst some simply dismissed his theories on bions as nonsense, others accused him of being ignorant of even basic scientific procedures and micro-biological facts. When in 1938 his visa expired, several scientists argued against this being renewed and his case became something of a cause célèbre in Norway [7]. 

 

When Reich eventually left Norway, he did so feeling a little humiliated and full of anger for those who had denounced him and ridiculed his work. The scandal - and his various love affairs - had also taken its toll on his relationship with Lindenberg. And thus when Reich asked her to accompany him to the United States, she declined, leaving him to set sail all on his lonesome. 

 

Details of Reich's American years can be found in part two of this post: click here.

 

 

Notes

 

[1] It was the 1983 Pelican edition, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno.

 

[2] For Deleuze and Guattari, Reich deserves credit for being the first to address the question of the relationship between desire and the social field (and for daring to go further in this direction than Marcuse). Whilst admitting his work has its problematic aspects, they find Reich's comparison of sexuality with cosmic phenomena, such as electrical storms or sunspot activity, preferable to Freud's "reduction of sexuality to the pitiful little familialist secret" and it was Reich, more than anyone else, who upheld the great perverse truth of psychoanalysis, i.e., "the independence of sexuality with regard to reproduction".

      See: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 291-92.

 

[3] Kate Bush, 'Cloudbusting', a single release from Hounds of Love, (EMI, 1985): click here to play and watch the offical video, dir. Julian Doyle, and ft. Donald Sutherland in the role of Wilhelm Reich.

 

[4] Lore Kahn's parents claimed that their daughter had died after a botched illegal abortion, possibly performed by Reich himself. Whilst recognising the tragedy of what happened, Reich also found his role within the young woman's death and subsequent suicide of her mother absurdly amusing, noting in his diary: 'I am acting out a comedy, while causing the people around me to die!'   

 

[5] Hopes that he might be able to set up shop in London were dashed when it became clear that support from the psychoanalytic circle in England was not going to be forthcoming. It had been decided that Reich had unresolved hostility issues and was living in a world of his own. 

      The unique form of treatment Reich developed from 1930 onwards also caused eyebrows to be raised and alarm bells to sound. Based on touch, it involved patients stripping off and allowing him to perform a special type of massage in order to loosen their body armour (i.e., their muscular and characterological rigidity). In the hope of retrieving repressed childhood memories and triggering genuine feelings, Reich would also ask patients to physically simulate certain emotions (such as anxiety, rage, and ecstasy). If the session was successful, he claimed to see waves of pleasure move through the bodies of his patients (what he called the orgasm reflex or streaming). Initially wanting to call this new treatment orgasmotherapy, Reich evetually settled on the name of vegetotherapy (i.e., arousal therapy).  

 

[6] In 1935, Reich also bought an oscillograph and attached it to student volunteers at the University of Oslo, who agreed to touch and kiss each other while he monitored the results. As you do ...

 

[7] The affair generated a good deal of press coverage throughout 1938, with more than 165 articles and letters appearing in Norwegian newspapers, the vast majority of which attacked Reich and his work. 

Grand Austrian Perverts 3: Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) [1]

Photo by Max Halberstadt (c. 1921)

 

A sexual act is perverse if it has abandoned the aim of reproduction 

and pursues the attainment of pleasure as an aim independent of it.

 

 

I. 

 

So far in this series on großen Perversen Österreichs, we have discussed the cases of Arthur Schnitzler and Egon Schiele [2]. 

 

But I could have very easily have selected another writer - Sacher-Masoch, for example - just as I might have chosen another painter as the subject of my study, such as Gustav Klimt. For there are plenty of grand perverts [3] in the world - particularly in the arts - and Austria has its fair share of 'em.

 

This dilemma of choice is just as real within the world of psychoanalysis: Otto Gross and Wilhelm Reich certainly have strong claims to be considered within this series, for example. 

 

However, I've already written a post in memory of the former [click here] and although the latter - with his orgone accumulators and sex-pol clinics, etc. - is certainly an interesting figure, ultimately, one can't help thinking back to the man who initially inspired them both, Sigmund Freud ...

 

 

II.

 

Freud has a good claim on being perhaps the grandest of all grand perverts; one who understood how the inherently perverse nature of human sexuality - and the manner in which the perversions are either repressed or sublimated - is central to the reproduction of heteronormative civilisation.           

 

Although, as a reader of Lawrence and Deleuze, I am obviously not a Freudian, I will always be grateful for his insight that one does not become a pervert; that one is, rather, born such. And that even after healthy adult individuals renounce the polymorphously perverse pleasures of childhood in favour of undeviating genital intercourse, these kinks don't just disappear, but return in a multiplicity of strange forms.   

 

Indeed, for Freud, no matter how necessary it is to repress the perverse aspects of our nature - and no matter how well we sublimate such pleasures (even to the point of neurosis) -  "some perverse trait or other is seldom absent from the sexual life of normal people" [4] - even if this is just the desire to explore the mouth of one's lover with one's tongue in a passionate kiss. 

 

As Freud says, far from being that which transcends perversion, love is that which liberates it: "Being in love [...] has the power to remove repressions and reinstate perversions" [5] - that's what makes it so intensely exciting and feel so dangerous. 

 

It's unfortunate, therefore, that as psychoanalysis developed it became increasingly hostile to perversions and paraphilias. Whether Freud himself was responsible for this, or whether certain reactionary followers appropriated and contained his more radical ideas within a more traditional metaphysical schema, is debatable.     

 

Commentators who wish to stress the revolutionary nature of Freud's project will perhaps give him the benefit of the doubt, arguing that his work subverts traditional theories of sexuality, even if, ultimately, he remains an idealist. Jonathan Dollimore, for example, suggests that Freud's theory of the perversions retains and develops the paradoxes and displacements that give it its dynamic nature [6]. 

 

I think that's true. And I also agree with Dollimore when he writes that Freud is unrelenting in finding perversion "in those places where it is conventionally thought to be most absent" [7] - such as childhood. 

 

For children are not just sexual beings, but their sexuality is quintessentially perverse. Like that of many artists and intellectuals, who retain a certain quality of childlike innocence about them even when exploring illicit desires and forbidden pleasures.  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm not - for obvious reasons - going to try and provide full details of Freud's life and work here in this short post; rather, I just wish to discuss his theory of perversion, the aspect of his psychoanalytic project that interests me most. However, for those who would like the very barest of biographical facts ... 

      Born to Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in May 1865, Freud qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna, the city where he lived and worked for most of his life, having set up his clinical practice there in 1886. 

      In 1938, Freud fled Austria to escape Nazi persecution (his books were prominent amongst those burnt in 1933) and he died in London in 1939. 

      As the founder of psychoanalysis, his influence upon Western thought and culture in the 20th-century has been immense and he is often named alongside Marx and Nietzsche as one of the three great masters of suspicion (a term coined by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur). And even if, today, psychoanalysis as a diagnostic and clinical practice is in decline and many of his ideas contested, Freud's writings as a form of fiction-theory, remain of great interest to many scholars across the humanities. 

      As D. H. Lawrence wrote in his Introduction to Fantasia of the Unconscious (1923), we should be grateful that Freud insisted on the importance of the sexual element in our lives: "We are thankful that Freud pulled us somewhat to earth, out of all our clouds of superfineness."   

    

[2] For the post on Schnitzler, click here. For the post on Schiele, click here. 

[3] I am borrowing this phrase from D. H. Lawrence, who, in a letter to Aldous Huxley, once described St. Francis, Michelangelo, Goethe, Kant, Rousseau, Byron, Baudelaire, Wilde and Marcel Proust as grand perverts. Click here for my post on this subject.

[4] Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Vol. 1 in the Pelican Freud Library (Penguin Books, 1973), p. 364. 

 

[5] Sigmund Freud,  On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 11 in the Pelican Freud Library (Penguin Books, 1984), p. 95.

 

[6] Jonathan Dollimore, 'The Cultural Politics of Perversion: Augustine, Shakespeare, Freud, Foucault', originally published in Genders No. 8: (University of Texas Press, Summer 1990), pp. 1-16, but which can now be read in the open access online version of Genders on the University of Colorado website: click here.    

      In this brilliant essay - which has informed my thinking here and elsewhere - Dollimore attempts (amongst other things) to sketch out the far-reaching implications of Freud's theory of the perverse; to show how, at the very least, "a range of central binary oppositions (spiritual/carnal, pure/degenerate, normal/abnormal), oppositions upon which the social order depends, are either inverted, removed, or collapsed into a relational interdependence".

 

[7] Ibid. 

 

Repress Nothing! In Memory of Otto Gross

Otto Gross (1877 - 1920)

Otto Gross - the maverick psychoanalyst and utopian anarchist whom radicals and exponents of free love continue to revere - died 100 years ago today: from pneumonia; aged 42; in a Berlin hospital, having been found lying in the street, starving, penniless, and half-frozen to death.

A sad and premature (arguably all-too-predictable) end to the life of a charismatic drug-addict who spent much of his adult life in and out of psychiatric institutions and who rejected all caution and restraint; a man who was even evicted from the community of bohemians at Ascona for trying to instigate orgies at which participants could openly explore their bisexual desires. [1]    

Inspired by his readings of Max Stirner, Nietzsche and Kropotkin, it's said that Gross influenced in turn many artists and writers with his neo-pagan (and proto-feminist) attempt to revalue all values, including D. H. Lawrence - which, of course, is where my interest in him comes from, rather than his relationship to Freud and Jung, who basically thought him a hopeless madman about whom the less said the better.

Lawrence, of course, never met Gross and doesn't directly refer to him in his writings. [2] But his wife, Frieda, had had an affair with the latter in 1908 (at the same time that Gross was also involved with Frieda's sister, Else) and so a lot of his revolutionary ideas to do with politics, culture, the unconscious and human sexuality, were transmitted via her. It's almost certain that Lawrence also read Gross's letters to Frieda (which she treasured throughout her life):

"They affirmed the idea of the saving sexual relationship outside the bonds of society: they stressed how a sexually liberated woman could escape the trammels of the ordinary and be an inspiration for intellectual and striving men; they showed a passionately thinking man struggling to come to terms with the new and to escape the past. In many ways, they offered Lawrence the themes for his next eight years of writing; and (above all) they offered a way of thinking about Frieda [whom Gross regarded as the woman of the future]." [3]

Having said that, it's important to stress that Lawrence would have mistrusted (and disliked) Gross in person and to note that he soon saw through his idealism - including his sexual and political idealism.

And for us, living here in 2020, does Gross's thinking still trouble, still challenge? Or does it only bore and depress? Unfortunately, that's a question that some also ask of Lawrence ...

Notes

[1] Perhaps more interesting from a thanatological perspective, is the fact that Gross affirmed the sovereign freedom of the individual not merely in sexual terms, but also as the right to be ill and to die in a manner (and at a time) of their own choosing. He regarded neurosis and suicide as legitimate expressions of protest against a repressive social order.    

[2] Lawrence gives us a fictionalised representation of Otto Gross in his unfinished novel Mr Noon (written 1921-22); the character of Eberhard appears in Part II of the work. 

[3] John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 443-44.

See also: John Turner, Cornelia Rumpf-Worthen and Ruth Jenkins, 'The Otto Gross - Frieda Weekley Correspondence: Transcribed, Translated, and Annotated', in The D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 22, No. 2, (Summer, 1990), pp. 137-227. Click here to read online. 

D. H. Lawrence and the Novel (Part 2)

Rhea Daniel: Portrait of D. H. Lawrence (2017)

doodleaddicts.com

D. H. Lawrence was acutely concerned with the (moral) question of the novel: its conventional limitations and future possibilities.

After writing three earlier essays on this theme - two of which we discussed in the first part of this post - Lawrence wrote a further couple of essays on the novel in 1925, neither of which were published in his lifetime (or even typed). They first appeared in print in Phoenix (1936), along with other posthumous texts, edited by Edward D. McDonald. 

III. Why the Novel Matters

For Lawrence, the novel matters because it teaches us to recognise and to revere the life of the body; to know that "paradise is in the palm of your hand" [194], which - if you put it in Latin - would make a fitting motto above the door of a school of masturbation, were such an institution ever to be established.

Priests and philosophers may prefer to talk of the spirit - or the soul, or the mind - but the novelist knows that every individual ends at their own finger-tips. It's a simple truth, says Lawrence, but one that it's difficult to get people to agree on and stick to. It's also the core idea of his vitalism and for Lawrence, nothing is more amazing than life which exists nowhere but within the living body; be that the body of a man or even a cabbage in the rain.

One of the reasons that Lawrence hates modern science is because, in his view, the latter has no use for living bodies; it is only interested, rather, in the organism, which is a metaphysical overcoding of the body and its organs and the establishment of a bio-logical hierarchy within it. Great novelists are interested in dis-organ-ising the body and building what Deleuze and Guattari term (after Artaud) a body without organs, or what Lawrence describes as "a very curious assembly of incongruous parts" [196]. 

Novels, of course, are not actually alive; they are "only tremulations on the ether" [195]. But the novel can make the living body of man tremble and unleash strange forces and flows of becoming. That is why the novel is "the one bright book of life" [195] and can help prevent readers from joining the legions of the undead (according to Lawrence, there are many men and women walking about like zombies and eating their dinners like masticating corpses).   

Thus, the novel doesn't teach you how to be good: it does, rather, something far more important than that; it cultivates an instinct for life ...

IV. The Novel and the Feelings

Lawrence isn't impressed with civilised humanity, always harping on the same old note: "Harp, harp, harp, twingle-twingle-twang!" [201] The note itself is okay; it's the exclusiveness (and repetition) that becomes unbearable. He also thinks that we are poorly educated concerning the self, despite the fact that, as a species, we have "combed the round earth with a tooth-comb, and pulled down the stars almost within grasp" [201].

Ultimately, most individuals know more about the composition of celluloid and the latest fashion in shoes than about the stormy chaos within. But, says Lawrence, the times they are a-changin' and "wild creatures are coming forth from the darkest Africa inside us" [202]. If you listen carefully, you can hear them calling, although some are completely silent, like slippery fishes. Lawrence calls these wild creatures feelings, which he contrasts with emotions:

"Emotions are things we more or less recognise. We see love, like a woolly lamb, or like a [...] decadent panther [...] We see hate, like a dog chained to a kennel. We see fear, like a shivering monkey. We see anger, like a bull with a ring through its nose, and greed, like a pig. Our emotions are our domesticated animals, noble like the horse, timid like the rabbit, but all completely at our service." [202] 

For the feelings, we do not as yet even have a language - and most often do not even allow that they exist, despite the fact that we only exist "because of the life that bounds and leaps into our limbs and our consciousness, from out of the original dark forest within us" [203].

Coming over all Nietzschean, Lawrence argues that man is the only creature who has deliberately - and successfully - tamed himself, fatally mistaking tameness for civilisation. The problem is that tameness, like an addictive drug, destroys us in the end, by robbing us of self-control and the power of command.

We thought tameness would lead to happiness - and, in a sense, maybe it has; albeit the happiness of the last man. But, ultimately, it leads to madness and an orgy of destruction, and unless we "connect ourselves up with our own primeval sources" [204] we shall degenerate inside our own enclosures.

We have, says Lawrence, to un-tame ourselves and learn to cultivate the feelings. But, of course, that's not easy: "It is nonsense to pretend we can un-tame ourselves in five minutes. That, too, is a slow and strange process, that has to be taken seriously." [204]

Psychoanalysis won't help - for the Freudians show the greatest horror of all when confronted by the Old Adam, whom they regard as a monster of perversity. We have to listen, rather, "to the voices of the honorable beasts that call in the dark paths of the veins of our body" [205].

And if we can't hear their voices within ourselves, well, then, we can do the next best thing: "look in the real novels, and there listen in" [205]. Not to the didactic assertions or personal opinions of the author, "but to the low, calling cries of the characters, as they wander in the dark woods of their destiny" [205].

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Why the Novel Matters' and 'The Novel and the Feelings', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 191-98 and 199-205.

Readers interested in part one of this post on 'The Future of the Novel' and 'Morality and the Novel', should click here. 

Freud in the Age of Neuroscience

Image: Alison Mackey / Discover (2014)

As a matter of fact, although Freud is often described as the father of psychoanalysis and credited with discovering the unconscious mind, he didn't invent the term Unbewußte.

It was coined, rather, by the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling and was first used in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800); a work that some regard as a precursor to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1899). One of Schelling's readers happened to be the influential poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and it was he who introduced this concept into the English-speaking world.

I think it's important to be reminded of this. Reminded, that is to say, of the metaphysical and romantic origins of Freudian analysis. For whilst it has always liked to present itself as a modern science, this is highly contestable and I don't think it coincidental that many of its concepts have continued to exert their strongest appeal amongst philosophers, literary critics, film theorists, and those working in the arts, such as the Surrealists.    

This is not to belittle the huge cultural impact of psychoanalysis, nor deny that Freud was a true founder of discursivity, to use Foucault's phrase, establishing an almost infinite number of new ways to think and speak the self, the non-self, and other. But, psychoanalysis isn't - and never has been - a legitimate science.

For one thing - as Karl Popper pointed out - its theories have either not been tested or are unable to be tested and so can neither be verified nor shown to be false. Other well known figures, including the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker and evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould, have also criticised psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience. The theoretical physicist Richard Feynman even went so far as to dismiss practitioners of psychoanalysis as witch doctors.              

And then there are eliminative materialists, such as Paul and Patricia Churchland, who deny the mental states and structures that those subscribing to Viennese folk psychology accept as realities. For them, there are brains and we should stick to talking about brain activity and neural networks when putting forward any theory of  mind. Thus, there is no unconscious that we can locate and which is home to all kinds of horrors and oedipal desires (let's not even mention mythological archetypes).       

I have to admit, I'm certainly sympathetic to this way of thinking and - push comes to shove - I can't help seeing recent developments in neuroscience as fatal to psychoanalysis; making it look not just obsolete and irrelevant, but, simply, wrong - and at times laughably so (I'm thinking of Freud's ideas concerning psychosexual development, for example).

Finally, be it noted that Freud's notion of psychic determinism - which posits that any and all mental processes have significance (even those things that seem arbitrary or banal) - also appears to be a lot of phooey. For research has shown that a large amount of what goes on in the brain can be regarded as ephemeral cognition and perceptual junk. And this includes our precious dreams - described by Allan Hobson as randomised imagery that has nothing to do with unconscious desires or dramatised wish-fulfilment.*

So where now and what next for psychoanalysis? Well, it seems that in order to survive in this age of neuroscience it is having to adapt and evolve into a hybrid discipline known as neuropsychoanalysis.

Adherents to this new movement - led by the South African neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms - fully support modern brain research, but, on the other hand, they're appalled by eliminativism and argue that the mind and the subjective laws that determine mental life are real and thus deserve be taken seriously.

It seems to me, however, that they mostly want to rehabilitate their master's name; thus their constant reminding us of the fact that the young Freud was a qualified medical doctor who spent many years working in the area of natural science as a neuropathologist. For Solms et al, it seems that no matter how much he got wrong, Freud remains worthy of respect - and not just in the humanities and social science departments.   

*Interestingly, this was also D. H. Lawrence's position in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), where he writes that most dreams are purely insignificant; just "heterogeneous odds and ends of images swept together accidentally". It is, says Lawrence, "beneath our dignity to attach any real importance to them". Indeed, to imagine them loaded with meaning is simply a sign of our narcissism. Readers interested in the chapter on 'Sleep and Dreams' can read it free online thanks to Project Gutenberg by clicking here. 

This post grew out of discussion with Dr Simon Solomon to whom I am grateful.