Review: Becoming Aware of the Unconscious | nd-aktuell.de

Was Sigmund Freud a brilliant scientist or just a gifted storyteller? In any case, he revolutionized thinking and opened the “century of psychology,” as Steve Ayan calls the period from the late 19th century to the 1970s in the subtitle of his book “Soul Magic.”

The starting point is the new form of treatment, “psychoanalysis”. Freud, together with the treating doctor Josef Breuer, attributed the psychological suffering of the patient “Anna O.”, which was still described as hysteria at the time, to the repression of unconscious sexual desires and experiences that were not accessible to memory. From now on, what had previously been taboo became of interest in the study of the soul: the libido and the suppressed and lived desires. How such connections are diagnosed in the case of specific patients, however, seems very contrived. An extreme example of this are the experiments of Freud follower Carl Gustav Jung, who made diagnoses based solely on word association chains. Jung later became president of the International Psychoanalytic Association, which Freud co-founded, before he fell out of favor with his role model and a break occurred. And with Freud’s growing following, the ideas of the psychoanalytic movement also became more differentiated, although its founder did not tolerate this.

While Freud started his analysis with the awareness of the unconscious, contemporaries and successors such as Otto Gross and Wilhelm Reich advocated tackling shame and instinctual renunciation and freeing the pent-up libido. Other psychologists, however, focus on other driving forces, such as Alfred Adler, the child’s feeling of inferiority. Finally, Sabina Spielrein adds a destructive instinct to the reproductive instinct, whereby both form a unity of becoming and decaying.

»Freud’s clinical stories are great literature.«

Steve Ayan psychologist

“Freud’s clinical stories, all of which were written in the noughties, are great literature,” says author Steve Ayan. The Viennese psychoanalyst Freud therefore primarily relies on anecdotal case reports that are also well composed in literary terms. One person who subjects Freud’s case studies to scathing criticism is the founder of behaviorism, John B. Watson. The goal and path of psychoanalysis remained opaque. In contrast, the American wants to see psychology as an objective and experimental branch of the natural sciences. According to his theory, people can be conditioned in a similar way to Pavlov’s dogs. From this he concludes that fears can also be unlearned through conditioning – a fundamental idea of ​​behavioral therapy, which is now being further developed by various psychologists. Talk therapy is emerging as a further, more empathetic, therapeutic approach.

The science journalist and psychologist Steve Ayan vividly describes the currents and representatives of psychology of a century – including narcissism and the sometimes questionable treatment of patients.

National Socialism and the persecution of Jews in Europe represent a turning point in this history. Many of the psychologists, like Sigmund Freud, were Jews, were banned from practicing their profession, had to flee or were even deported to concentration camps.

With the Heidelberg doctor and founder of the Socialist Patient Collective, Wolfgang Huber, the century of psychology comes to its end in Ayan’s retelling. Because if social conditions are the sole cause of mental suffering, as Huber assumes, then you no longer need to bother with individual therapy, but would be better off overthrowing the system. This idea was not very successful, but psychotherapy is in great demand, whereby what helps the individual patient can be combined in therapy.

Steve Ayan: Soul Magic. From Vienna into the world – the century of psychology. dtv 2024, 400 pages, €26.