Well Action Psychotherapy

The Freudian Project was doomed from the outset. The intention was all good, to make observations of clinical phenomena and to construct a model that could explain the phenomena and make predictions.

Also Freud’s observations were brilliant: such phenomena as transference, and defensive behaviours such as displacement, sublimation, projection, rationalisation etc. not to mention the foundation on which Freud’s reputation was built: the existence of unconscious mental processes … all these observations of clinical subjects are still agreed upon by pretty much all mental health practitioners of all disciplines, schools and flavours.

Freud wanted a model for these phenomena which could claim “scientific” status. Back in Freud’s day what constituted a Scientific model differed a little from today’s concept of “Scientific”, but Freud’s aim was not far off the mark: At a time when theories in physics were at the early stages of exploring subatomic particles and the structure of the atom, physical entities that were “hidden from sight” because they are so small they cannot be directly observed, Freud was taking a similar approach – hypothesising entities (ego, id), structures (conscious, unconscious, superego) and substances (libido) and forces (life force, death wish), and then seeing where the model took him. Freud wanted his theory to be “deterministic”: as in the physical sciences, cause leads to effect. He also wanted it to be “objective”, based on the unbiased observations of a trained clinician, rather than be based on conjecture, opinion, emotional response, supernatural forces (e.g. “God”) and metaphor.

So what went wrong?

In my opinion, one of Freud’s earliest constructions was fundamentally flawed as an “objective” entity: The Ego. Lying at the core of the question “What is conscious, what is unconscious, and why?” is our daily experience of “being conscious” – that pool of awareness within which we dwell from moment to moment, and this is where Freud started.

Unfortunately, what Freud “took for granted”, this “axiom”, this “fundamental assumption that is so obvious that it needs no deeper explanation”, is not an “Objective observation”. Consciousness is not an observation, it’s not something that can be measured or compared, it’s an experience. We cannot compare the experience of the colour Green from one person to another … we have no idea if what one person experiences when they feel pain is what another experiences. Still, after two centuries of philosophical investigation, and over a century of Freud, we cannot even agree on a definition of consciousness, let alone answer the question “What is it?”.

This in my opinion is why the Freudian Project of an objective and scientific model was always doomed: its first and most important foundational conjecture, the existence of an “Ego”, was never an objective observation, was never a scientific concept: it was always an existential metaphor, and remains so to this day.

Freud very quickly ran into trouble. The “Ego”, in his theory the seat of consciousness, had to be expanded in definition to include unconscious processes (the “gatekeeper” function that keeps unwelcome content from becoming conscious), and then it became part of something much bigger, a little blip sitting on top of an “Id”, and then it became intimately bound up with verbal reasoning … There is an urban proverb: “When you’re up to your neck in sh*t, stop digging”, and Freud would have done well to heed this advice.