By JUDE DOUGHERTY
How we became what we are. There are many explanations. One plausible account is found in the work of Rudolf Allers, who wrote about the European intellectual landscape from 1850 to the opening decades of the twentieth century. Hegel and Nietzsche played their roles in shaping “modernity,” or whatever you may want to call it.
From Allers we learn the meaning of the emerging disciplines — psychiatry, psychology, existentialism — and their varieties and exponents. We are exposed to the work of Gabriel Marcel, Ortega y Gasset, and others who tried to bridge or reconcile the gap between modernity and tradition.
Allers is best known for The Successful Error, a critical study of Sigmund Freud, and for his The Psychology of Character. It is to be remembered that Allers and Freud, Jung, and Adler are regarded as the founders of psychoanalysis, though Allers and Adler were soon to distance themselves from Freud. In rejecting Freud’s materialism, Allers was nevertheless appreciative of the insight psychoanalysis provided to those engaged in the treatment of mental illnesses. “Even the greatest errors of the human mind contain some truth,” wrote Allers.
Our knowledge of the working of the human mind, our knowledge of human personality and character have been advanced because of psychoanalysis. Its contributions also include a psychology of sensation, elementary laws concerning memory, the range of perception and apperception — notions all useful in education, sociology, and history.
Freud’s theory was initially advanced to enable the cure of neurotic patients, and later of mental illnesses generally. The existence of abnormal conduct raises the question of how to define normalcy, that is, human nature. We are told there were very few scientists or physicians prior to 1900 who were willing to consider as relevant, strictly philosophical ideas such as human nature.
During the nineteenth century, the majority of psychiatrists regarded mental diseases as brain diseases. It was not science that suggested this idea, but philosophical materialism. Nor was it observation or empirical research that led to a greater emphasis on “striving,” “appetition,” “will,” and “instinct” in the teaching of Freud and Jung, but the agnosticism of Arthur Schopenhauer whose The World as Will and Representation proved to be highly influential at the time.
When psychology became a discipline in its own right in the second half of the nineteenth century, it offered little that was of use to psychiatry. What was needed was a theory of human nature which would encompass somatic as well as mental aspects and explain their relationship. Karl Jaspers abandoned psychiatry to become a philosopher. Rollo May and Ludwig Binswanger remained practicing psychiatrists while devoting considerable attention to philosophical questions. Jean-Paul Sartre in his L’Etre et Le Neant devoted a long chapter to existential psychoanalysis.
Man may have learned to master the external world of physical forces, improved his living conditions, and reached a much higher standard of living. The question of what man is remained unanswered.
Freud prided himself on being scientific. Allers finds in Freud an optimistic faith in science to do what it cannot do. He did not recognize concepts or procedures except those utilized and used by the natural sciences. Given that science operates exclusively within the categories of material and efficient causality, Freud could not admit any “projective” or teleological principle, could not admit of purpose in nature or human nature. Such is not discernible. Biology remains a thorn, because it is difficult to deny that organs have their purpose within the whole. Darwin’s theory of “natural selection” was then incorporated to account for the seemingly purposeful character of the organism.
It is generally conceded that psychoanalysis is effective in discovering the origin and the causes of mental states. But it may be questioned when it aims to explain the life of mankind, the evolution of culture, of religion or social phenomena. In order to understand the true nature of mental phenomena, one may have to go back into the remote past of the individual for nothing is ever totally forgotten, but the concept may be misapplied if used to interpret social phenomena.
Allers insists that psychoanalysis stands or falls with its materialist assumptions. If one is not a materialist, one cannot accept the Freudian outlook. Psychoanalysis is basically anti-Christian. This is seen when Freud speaks of Christianity as an “illusion,” religion as “the neurosis of groups,” and God as a “father figure.” Seemingly, he was not aware of the enormous difference between the Jewish and Christian conception of God, nor of the pagan idea of a supreme god.
In Allers’ account, Freud denies free will, ignores the spirituality of the human soul, identifies mental with bodily phenomena, admits of no end but bodily pleasure, and is given to a confused but nevertheless obstinate subjectivism. Such a philosophy does not have even one point in common with Christian thought.
Allers is not alone in recognizing that a true account of human nature may await the recovery of classical antiquity. From Plato and Aristotle, modernity may learn that the immaterial or spiritual component of human nature is not empirically discerned but reasoned from empirical evidence.
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