“I’m not here to tell you about Jesus”: Don Draper and the Death of God

In the first-season episode “The Hobo Code,” which in many ways is the most important of the series, Don Draper is selling Peggy’s copy to a reluctant client. He goes on the offensive, asking them to leave if they aren’t serious about changing their strategy, and along the way he makes an enigmatic statement: “Listen, I’m not here to tell you about Jesus. You already know about Jesus, either he lives in your heart or he doesn’t.” The pitch proves effective, and when Ken Cosgrove mentions how great “the Jesus thing” was (perhaps implicitly asking what it means), Don explains that “sometimes force is actually being requested.” I am probably not alone in finding this explanation, such as it is, less than helpful.

So what does the quote mean? Or better: What role does it play in the episode and the season?

Taubes and Zizek

From Jacob Taubes, “Psychoanalysis and Philosophy,” in From Cult to Culture, pp. 323-24:

The analysis of man according to the guideline of history, carried out for example by Hegel and Marx, is replaced around the middle of the nineteenth century by an analysis of man according to the guidleline of psychology…. Freud is positioned within this turn, and his psychoanalysis gives it a particular acuity. And still, the problem of history poses itself anew in Freud…. Psychoanalysis differs from all other variations of psychology as the most radically historical. Its fundamental design is historical. It works with histories of illness and with the biography of the individual as a constitutive part of its therapy…. A reflection on the process of psychoanalytic theraby necessarily encounters the problem of the historical method in general and, as I claim, particularly the problems of the historical-dialectical method. It is the explicit thesis of these reflections that Freud’s psychological writings in general and his metapsychological writings in particular answer questions posed by Hegel’s dialectical method and philosophy of history. That is, sub specie Freud the fundamental problems of Hegel appear in a new light; sub specie Hegel, the fundamental problems of Freud appear in a new light.

A Kleinian Appreciation

Over the last month I’ve been reading through Melanie Klein’s published works in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921-1945. Tonight I had the joy of reading her paper “Symposium on Child-Analysis” (1927) which is a response to Anna Freud’s critique of Klein’s play technique with children. I wanted to describe some of Klein’s intriguing arguments and then describe how Kleinians have a radically different way of approaching analysis for patients from all populations: children, adult neurotics and psychotics.

Insight and Change in Psychotherapy

In a recent comment on CBT and psychoanalytic therapy, a commenter, Dr. Jason Ramsay offered a familiar criticism levied against psychoanalysis:

I loosed the boundaries of CBT and found myself working from a psychodynamic perspective more and more, because that is what they wanted. What I found was that lots of insight was generated. Some could, some could not. But in the end, insight was rarely enough to help them change years and years of maladaptive behaviour. In the end, I think that what many of my patients in the study wanted was a combination of insight and technique oriented treatment, just for much much longer than the 12 weeks we were able to offer.

There is much to reflect on here, especially in the wake of a paper I recently presented on social adaptation and the goal(s) of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic clinicians are consistently critiqued by others in the profession that knowledge and truth are not sufficient to facilitate change. Some go so far to even discourage exploration and view it as a defense against making “real behavioral change.” While I am not absolutely against providing certain patients with skills (particularly in extreme situations such as psychosis) I always wonder a bit about this argument. I should note that I have yet to be trained to provide psychoanalysis just psychotherapy (although the dividing line is questionable as my old Lacanian teacher once told me). One is led to believe that unless certain folks are given skills they will never be able to make lasting changes. Let me try and break this idea down further.

Saving Freud from himself

I just got through a couple weeks of teaching Freud, which was a lot of fun. It was particularly interesting to do as I’ve been spending so much time with Lacan lately — it seems to me that the basic Lacanian interpretative strategies and emphases really “work” in the classroom setting, though by this I don’t mean much more than highlighting the “linguistic” element. We did a handful of his introductory lectures along with the case of Elizabeth von R. from Studies in Hysteria, and with regard to the latter, I feel like in discussion I stumbled across a really evocative way of putting the problem of hysteria: what kind of beings must we humans be if we can get sick from a pun?

That case study also includes the kind of thing that always disappoints me in Freud, namely, his desire to bring things back to some kind of biological origin. In his concluding reflections on the function of metaphor in hysteria, he brings in Darwin’s theory of the origin of the emotions (also quoted by James, by the way!), and things really fall flat for me at that point. There’s something similar skewing his theory of feminine sexuality, it seems to me — many of my students felt frankly betrayed after reading “Femininity” from the New Introductory Lectures, and I think it’s the gravitational pull of the idea of a “natural” biological outcome that produces all the well-known contradictions and slippages in his argumentation here. (And to their credit, my students engaged more in authentic critique than in extrinsic criticism, as Freud had built up enough good will in their minds in previous readings that they tried to stay with him for as long as they could.)

I know I’m not saying anything original, but it’s striking to see how this unfolds among students approaching Freud for the first time — and to juxtapose it with my current work with Lacan, so that I can see so clearly the ways in which Lacan might, from a certain perspective, be “saving Freud from himself,” bringing forward his most authentic and radical insights and freeing them of the gravitational pull of naturalistic reductionism.

Psychoanalysis and the Social Order

As I’m preparing my conference presentation which I’ve briefly discussed here, I’ve been reading some early papers by Freud. I especially enjoyed “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness” (1908). I found Freud’s observations very prescient and provocative. In this paper he discusses how society’s regressive attitude about sexuality contributed to the high rates of neurosis in both men and women. Freud is critical of the value society placed on abstinence, believing that the amount of energy it required was certain to deplete the individual’s capacity to fully exert himself in other arenas. He argues that men who are abstinent before marriage ultimately do a disservice to themselves and their future wives because it renders them weakling who have irreparably damaged their libido. Freud goes on to claim that women are often promised that marriage will finally satisfy their sexual desires, when, in reality, it will certainly prove to be disappointing and unsatisfying. Freud criticizes those doctors who encouraged “nervous” women to get married, because Freud noted that “the cure for nervous illness arising from marriage would be marital unfaithfulness”. Due to societal repression of their sexual instincts (along with great moralistic coercion), women are forced to find “seek refuge in neurosis” and remain in their hapless marriages. Interesting stuff.

What intrigued me about this paper was that Freud raises larger questions about society and condemns cherished institutions and norms given that they are responsible for individual pathology. Eric Fromm also discussed how society can often have socially patterned defects and that adaptation to a pathological society should not be seen as healthy. Fromm argued quite persuasively that adaptation and conformity to the social order might be a sign of individual pathology. Surprisingly, social adaptation has been upheld as healthy in many psychoanalytic camps as the gold standard for “mental health” especially in the United States (think of Hartmann’s fixation on adaptation and Sullivan’s emphasis on consensual validation). Also, in my clinical experience, I’ve found that many clinicians are liable to label non-normative beliefs and skepticism of major institutions (e.g. marriage) as defenses rather than adult convictions.

Lacan likewise detested these analysts who upheld adaptation and conformity as the aim of psychoanalysis. Of course, for us clinicians in the trenches, things are not always so simple. Psychoanalytic clinicians also uphold neutrality (not taking side in the patient’s conflicts) and abstain from suggestion. Kernberg has written about how analytic neutrality has often served as a mask to obscure the analyst’s prejudices and ideology. My paper will move in the direction of stressing how Lacan’s understanding of the unconscious and desire necessarily require an analysis of the social order.

I think that the rules have to change radically when working with individuals who are suffering from psychosis but that’s another conversation. I’ve never really had much sympathy with the anti-psychiatry movement…

Overheard remarks

In connection the directed reading over Lacan that I’m supervising, I recently read Jonathan Lear’s Freud, which I assigned to make up for the fact that we can’t literally do the ideal thing to prepare for the reading of Lacan, i.e., read all of Freud 14 times in German. Lear spent some time on Freud’s dream of the botanical manuscript, the interpretation of which hinged crucially on something Freud’s father said about him, in his presence, but not to him: “He’ll never amount to anything.” I recalled that Bruce Fink had also reported the importance of overheard parental declarations in psychoanalysis — and the fact that the crucial declaration may not even be about the child himself or herself (for example, if Freud’s father made the same declaration about the neighbor boy, but Freud had misunderstood it as referring to him), an idea that for some reason struck me as deeply tragic and meaningful.

A chain of associations opened up. For instance, once when I was in grade school, I decided that I should become a spy and hid under my parents’ bed and listened to an odd conversation.

In Defense of Sexual Repression

As a student of psychoanalytic psychology, I feel I’m in a good position to respond to this post that I found problematical.

1) Freud was located in a particular place at a particular time. Freud began his clinical work with Breuer by treating hysterics (Freud was revolutionary in suggesting that both men and women can be hysterical) who were developing inexplicable physical symptoms. Freud posited that sexual repression often led to somatic symptoms, which was the mind’s way to negotiate various conflicts. For example, some folks developed glove anesthesia (a physically impossible syndrome) which Freud traced back to the repression of masturbation by blocking the physical ability for self-stimulation. One of Freud’s greatest feminist contributions was normalizing and encouraging female sexuality, believing that society’s repression of female sexuality contributed to pathology

2) It’s a great simplification to claim that Freud blamed all societal problems on sexual repression. Freud claimed that both life and death drives demanded proper drive expression; hence, both aggression and sexuality are integral parts of what it means to be human. Humans must find appropriate, constructive outlets to sublimate these drive derivatives (wishes).

3) I don’t think there’s any legitimate connection between the sexual revolution and Freud’s theory of human sexuality. In fact, most US analysts were way too reactionary and homophobic when it came to sexuality.

4) I think you’re caricaturing the notion of sexual repression. Both sexual repression and compulsive, indiscriminate sexual expression can be pathological. Freud argued that we have to find adaptive ways to express our sexuality but he never held up promiscuity as some sort of ethical mandate. Even Lacan’s maxim ‘not to give ground relative to one’s desire’ should not be read some sexual prescription.

5) I agree that Sullivan’s explanation of Catholic priests is inadequate. However, are you really going to defend Catholic priests by claiming that they’re equally likely to be pedophiles as general civilians? I’m sure we’d all like to think that Catholic priests should have a higher ethical code than the folks in the general population. What’s unforgivable with the Catholic Church is not simply the fact of childhood sexual abuse but the systemic attempt to cover up the abuse.

6) I don’t know what you would accept as legitimate scientific evidence because I think you’ve already decided that Freudian psychology is somehow part of the humanities. I find this to be a really misinformed view that is more reflective of an introduction to psychology course than the state of academic psychoanalytic psychology. First, you might check out the abundant evidence that psychodynamic psychotherapy is very efficacious. Second, you should check out developments in neuropsychoanalysis to examine the neurological evidence of the psychoanalytic theory of mind. Third, sexual repression is part of many disorders. It is more evident in certain diagnoses such as: OCD, some eating disorders and personality disorders (e.g. histrionic).

7) “It’s a way of justifying the lack of moral integrity and, indeed, the moral disintegration required to act on most every sexual whim, a way of rationalising away the extreme level of selfishness and self-regard implicit in a promiscuous lifestyle.” Honestly, I have no idea how you’re justifying this claim. Claiming that repression can lead to pathology does not advocate promiscuity (notice I’m not necessarily agreeing with you that promiscuity is sinful) nor does it somehow scapegoat religious people.

8) “If the complete lack of clarity and scientific basis weren’t enough, Christians should reject the idea that sexual repression is a unhealthy, futile and dangerous thing. Why? Because it is an anti-Christian myth.” First, just because something is anti-Christian doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Second, mental health is about balance. I’ve definitely seen Christians whose sexual repression led to bizarre and unhealthy sexual practices because of their overly punitive superego and repressive background.

9) Read Althaus-Reid’s Indecent Theology if you want to see a liberation theologian tackling sexual ethics in a progressive, feminist manner.

Psychoanalytic Views of Mental Health

Freud once wrote, “But you will be able to convince yourself that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health you will be better armed against that happiness” (Breuer & Freud, Studies on Hysteria, p. 306). Freud was clearly no optimist when it came to mental health. For Freud, society generally serves to discourage our natural libidinal and aggressive wishes through the creation of various social prohibitions that demand our drives be sublimated into healthy, socially acceptable channels. Freud never believed that psychoanalysis promised happiness. Instead, psychoanalysis is a quest for truth through the analysis of the patient’s unconscious wishes and beliefs.

The State of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

Shedler’s (2010) article ‘The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy’ dropped like a bombshell on the psychotherapy research world. He conducted a meta-analysis of the various meta-analyses on the efficacy of psychodynamic (psychoanalytic) psychotherapy. In the psychology world, proving the effectiveness of a psychotherapy treatment is important to placate the insurance companies and academic research psychologists (i.e the Big Other). Shedler’s review yielded impressive results. Not only was psychodynamic psychotherapy proven to have large effect sizes (larger than cognitive-behavioral therapy, currently the most popular form of psychotherapy in the States), but patients were shown to continue to make gains even after the termination of treatment. This was welcome news to psychoanalytic clinicians, as it verified the utility of our method. I am very proud of the results, as I have seen great improvements in my personal work with patients, which has only confirmed my beliefs.

However, what I wanted to address in this post is the way in which Shedler defined the unique ingredients that comprise psychodynamic treatment.