No, Julian hasn\’t stopped doing Bad Moves. He\’s just – er – slowed down quite a bit. In short, he\’s busy! But he\’ll get back to it as soon as he can.
One of the best such I\’ve ever read was in the American Psychologist, May \’87:\’Why Freud Failed.\’ As a onetime (female) psychology undergrad, I was always deeply suspicious of Freudian theory and found his attempts to reduce \’mind\’ to biology as banally reductive as the current vogue to \’explain\’ human behaviour/psychology in terms of so-called \’evolutionary\’ psychology. (Blush, Richard Dawkins, blush! You too E.O. Wilson – genetics does NOT account for psychology.) Biological theories of \’mind\’tend to founder on the issue of language, specifically its semantic aspect, or the question of \’meaning\’. When we understand the role language (operationally defined as the \’articulation of thought\’ and that includes mathematics) we will have a better understanding of emotions and their connection (perhaps origin?) in \’mind\’. Nothing I have currently read in the area of neuropsychology/genetics/consciousness
(including Pinker, Dennett, Triviers) suggests that we are any closer today than Freud.
When Freud wrote that \’sometimes a cigar is just a cigar\’ as an admonishment to those who would doom it forever to represent the \’phallus\’ he was wrong: the cigar is ALWAYS a cigar. The object simply is what it is,identified functionally by human beings. It is their subjective perception likewise that extends its \’meaning\’ beyond the (f)actual into the metaphorical. As metaphor, it reveals a good deal about the perciever and nothing whatsoever about the object.
I would also like to add my voice to those who argue that a study of history and literature is essential to understanding human behaviour, particularly emotions. I would go further and say that I myself learned far more from Beckett, Shakespeare and Mann, to cite only a few, than I ever did from Freud or any other psychologist.
P.S. That \’Taboo\’ quiz needs some serious overhauling. It fails to factor in time, eg. the capacity to envisage how a current action has potentially future repercussions. Couldn\’t someone incorporate Chaos Theory into it? Now THAT would be interesting, maybe even genuinely illuminating…
I\’d like to return to history. Allen Esterson\’s Seductive Mirage critiques Freudian ideas, but not against their historical background. The notorious id, ego, superego is an example.
Esterson quotes Freud saying in the New Introductory Lectures that the ego\’s \”three tyrannical masters are the external world, the super-ego, and the id.\” Esterson objects that,
\’… since this is saying little more than that man\’s consciousness is goverened by his environment, his conscience, and his innate instincts, it is hardly a great revelation.\’
Seductive Mirage, p. 230.
Taken in isolation, this seems straightforward. Esterson seems to grant here that all four of the things Freud talks about (external world, id, ego, superego) exist and that Freud’s terms for them correspond to ordinary terminology (environment, instincts, consciousness, conscience). If Esterson really accepted both these things, his complaint would be merely that Freud is not original.
Yet Esterson quickly shows that he does not really accept either of them. Responding to Freud’s response to the objection of unoriginality, Esterson writes \’If we take it that his newly formulated entities are the \”something better\” to take the place of the old ones, they are open to the same criticisms as the latter. Not only are they speculations of a kind not amenable to empirical validation, their functions are so imprecisely delineated that they can be employed in almost arbitrary fashion to provide support for virtually any theoretical formulation.\’
This argument seems to be directed equally against an ancient tradition of tripartite divisions and Freud\’s modern version of them. Yet while Freud is permitted to state his case, tradition is unfairly prosecuted in its absence.
There is nothing to support the charge that these divisions have been used traditionally in the capricious way Esterson claims Freud and his followers used them, constantly inventing new theoretical formulations and imposing them at whim. Hopefully the ancient Greeks were not guilty of this, nor traditional India, with its three gunas of sattva, tamas, rajas.
Empirical validation is not the question. Many things cannot be empircally validated that are nonetheless true, or so useful and basic to our way of thinking that they might just as well be. Most people do not worry about how to empirically validate the distinction between \’man\’s consciousness\’ and the environment. This and the other two divisions are either plausible, coherent, and useful, or else not.
The main earlier arguments against tripartion have recognized this. Descartes, who argued against Plato\’s version of the tripartition, which Freud\’s was modelled after, and Sartre, who argued against Freud\’s version, were not preoccupied with the possibility of empirically validating it, but with its internal coherence.
For Esterson cannot have it both ways. Freud\’s proposed psychic divisions cannot be both a banal reformulation of the obvious and an arbitrary invention. If they are a banal reformulation of the obvious, as Esterson first seemed to be implying, they are true. If they are arbitrary, then they are worthless, but Esterson equivocates: there is an \’almost\’ and a \’virtually\’ in his argument against Freud.
This equivocation shows that the argument is not thought through completely. How can there be degrees of arbitrariness? Usually something is either arbitrary or else it is not, especially when strict scientific standards are being called for. Admitting relative arbitrariness is showing a certain pragmatism.
If Freud revises his speculations, if he goes over things and changes them any number of times, this is because his work is an attempt at thinking through problems in the traditional conceptions that they have not faced before, to see what sense can be made of them and what uses they can be put to when they have been systematically elabourated. Freud certainly does not complete this task, but this hardly means it is not worth undertaking.
What is needed to complete the task is history, starting with ancient history. One must go over Freud\’s sources and see how they developed as they did. This helps clarify Freud, just as Freud helps clarify them.
I\’m sorry, I\’ll qualify something in that last post. Seductive Mirage addresses some of the history behind Freud\’s theories, but not in the id, ego, superego discussion, where theories similar to Freud\’s are criticised without being named.
Warnotck writes that I seem to grant that all four of the things Freud talked about (external world, id, ego and super-ego) exist on the basis of the fact that I wrote that, as they were initially presented (see Warnotck\’s first quotation), Freud is saying \”little more than that man\’s consciousness is governed by his environment, his conscience and his innate instincts\”. But that doesn\’t mean that I concede validity to the way that Freud then goes on to idiosyncratically define and refine the entities to which he has given names, or the functions he ascribes to them. It is in relation to these *more specific properties* of the said entities, and to their applications, that I wrote that \”they are speculations of a kind not amenable to empirical validation [and] their functions are so imprecisely delineated that they can be employed in almost arbitrary fashion to provide support for virtually any theoretical formulation.\” There is the world of difference between an initial simple presentation of his entities that, when translated into ordinary language, reflect what Freud himself acknowledges is \”universally known\”, and his more extended discussion of their functions, and the speculative and often incoherent structures that he builds on them. It is in regard to the *latter* that my critical remarks above are addressed.
So when Warnotck argues that I cannot have it both ways (the proposed psychic divisions cannot be both a banal formulation of the obvious and an arbitrary invention), he is failing to understand that I was referring to two different things (as spelled out in my previous paragraph). Even if this is in part the fault of my exposition at that point, my two approving quotes of MacDougall that followed should have sufficed to make it evident. I quoted MacDougall\’s describing Freud\’s ego-psychology writings as \”a great tangle\” in which Freud got himself caught \”like a great whale caught in a net of his own contriving\”, and also saying that \”if we allowed ourselves the laxity of reasoning which is habitual to Freud, and if we possessed his fertile ingenuity, there is no limit to the possibilities of applications of his principles\”. In other words, given the elasticity of his basic entities and their functions, his tolerance of inconsistencies, and his fertile imagination, Freud can always provide a superficially plausible \’explanation\’ for virtually any subject matter pertaining to the mind, emotions and behaviour. If you like that kind of thing, then that\’s fine. You have plenty to choose from: Freud, Jung, L. Ron Hubbard (Scientology), Christian Science, the system of the Chakras, etc. If you think \’explanation\’ is all that matters, and validation of no great moment, then the choice is wide.
Sean Purcell is probably thinking of me rather than Allen Esterson when he says the guy\’s mad. I may be mad, especially to continue the discussion at this stage, but I also have several good points, and Esterson has not responded to most of them.
Freud and Esterson are both wrong to say that the truths developed further in the id, ego, superego theory are \”universally known.\” Not everyone accepts them. Descartes and Sartre, as I mentioned, denied that the sort of psychic divisions found in Plato or Freud make sense. Many idealists deny that there is an \”external world\”. Many cognitive scientists deny that terms such as \”conscience\” refer to real entities.
If Esterson thinks that \”the conscience\” exists, he has the same obligation to prove this that Freud has to prove that \”the superego\” exists. Many people would say that the two concepts are equally superstitious, and they are not obviously wrong (I would say neither is superstitious, but that also places them on exactly the same level).
Esterson mentions ordinary language. This cannot be the last resort in any discussion. The complicated history of ordinary language has left it with burried assumptions that may or may not make sense. These assumptions are always at work when language is being used, even when something so presumably \”simple\” as Freud’s initial presentation of his entities is involved.
No assumption should be placed above criticism simply because it is not spelt out as part of a theory. Many of the assumptions of ordinary language are the result of past theoretical speculations which were absorbed into it, often changing their meaning in the process. There is no guarantee that they are not incoherent.
All the same criticisms can be made of them that Esterson makes of Freud’s entities: they are \”not amenable to empirical validation [and] their functions are so imprecisely delineated that they can be employed in almost arbitrary fashion to provide support for virtually any theoretical formulation.\”
Ordinary language is as much of a \”great tangle\”, or a net in which we are caught like a great whale, as Freud’s speculations are.
In response to Richard Warnotck, neither Freud nor I say that \”the truths *developed further* in the id, ego, superego theory are \’universally known\’.\” (my emphasis) How what I wrote, either in my previous posting, or in *Seductive Mirage*, can possibly be interpreted as my saying that Freud\’s ideas expressed in his writings on the id, ego and superego are universally known is beyond me.
Warnotck also writes:
> Esterson mentions ordinary language. This cannot be the last resort in any discussion.<
Since nothing in the context in which I used the words \”ordinary language\” (see my previous posting) remotely implies what Warnotck says here, the rest of his posting is redundant.
I\’m not sure there\’s much to be gained by exchanges in which I have to spend so much time explaining I didn\’t actually say what Warnotck says I said.
Is it not possible, and positive, to try to get others to force to look at things more closely (as with the disagreement over paintings)? And, if we all looked closely enough and from all sides out there, couldn\’t we discover some absolute-ish truth? Ie. couldn\’t Rosie\’s relativism lead to a more harmonious and enlightened absolutism eventually?
This is entering into very pedantic territory, but I don\’t think I have misrepresented Allen Esterson. I will quote him.
\’There is the world of difference between an initial simple presentation of his entities that, when translated into ordinary language, reflect what Freud himself acknowledges is \”universally known\”, and his more extended discussion of their functions, and the speculative and often incoherent structures that he builds on them.\’
It is wrong as a matter of fact that what Freud says in his \”simple\” initial presentation of his entities is \”universally known\” when translated into ordinary language. These supposedly \”universally known\” things are speculative and open to doubt. The problems involved in showing that they are true at all are not different in kind from the problems involved in showing that the details of what Freud says about them are true. Esterson has just blundered here.
There may be confusion about what I was saying, but I think that is Esterson’s fault and not mine. From his most recent post:
\’In response to Richard Warnotck, neither Freud nor I say that \”the truths *developed further* in the id, ego, superego theory are \’universally known\’.\” (my emphasis) How what I wrote, either in my previous posting, or in *Seductive Mirage*, can possibly be interpreted as my saying that Freud\’s ideas expressed in his writings on the id, ego and superego are universally known is beyond me.\’
I meant, of course, that it was those basic truths at the root of the id, ego, superego theory that both Freud and Esterson wrongly said were universally known, not Freud’s further elabouration of them. Esterson’s obviously mistaken view that they are universally known is expressed in my first quote from him.
Just a brief final response to Warnotck\’s latest posting. This whole brouhaha largely comes out of my writing in *Seductive Mirage* that when Freud wrote that that the ego\’s \”three tyrannical masters are the external world, the super-ego and the id\” he was \”saying little more than that man\’s consciousness is governed by his environment, his conscience, and his innate instincts\”. I had no wish to dissect this further, because, as should be evident from the context, my intention was not to engage in a philosophical discussion about the precise nature of human consciousness. It was merely to point out that the statement of Freud\’s quoted above was little more than another way of saying something commonplace. This is evident from my immediately following this with a quotation from Brian Farrell (a philosopher sympathetic towards psychoanalysis) in which he wrote that \”ego-psychology seems to be primarily a way of talking… In consequence of this, perhaps, it has not been of much heuristic value in psychology…\” It was evidently in response to this kind of criticism that Freud wrote that \”in ego-psychology it will be difficult to escape from what is universally known\”.
Now if Warnotck wants to challenge the notion that human consciousness is governed by his environment, his innate instincts, and his conscience (by which I meant, in this context, the ideas he brings to bear on the first two), then that\’s fine. But that really wasn\’t my concern: all I was doing was setting the scene for a criticism of Freud\’s ego-psychology, i.e., the further elaboration of his entities, and his subsequent use of them in developing his schema of the mind.
Now Warnotck tells me that when he wrote of ideas \”developed further in the id, ego, super-ego theory\” he didn’t mean Freud\’s \”further elaboration\” of the terms in which he introduced these basic entities. I think it is evident that it is time to call a halt. We\’re just going round in ever-decreasing circles.
Well, it seems that I am not going to reach agreement with Allen Esterson about this issue any time soon. I am confident, however, that I have pointed to some problems with his presentation of it in Seductive Mirage. I anticipate a somewhat revised treatment in any future edition.
No, Julian hasn\’t stopped doing Bad Moves. He\’s just – er – slowed down quite a bit. In short, he\’s busy! But he\’ll get back to it as soon as he can.
Re: Freudian Critiques
One of the best such I\’ve ever read was in the American Psychologist, May \’87:\’Why Freud Failed.\’ As a onetime (female) psychology undergrad, I was always deeply suspicious of Freudian theory and found his attempts to reduce \’mind\’ to biology as banally reductive as the current vogue to \’explain\’ human behaviour/psychology in terms of so-called \’evolutionary\’ psychology. (Blush, Richard Dawkins, blush! You too E.O. Wilson – genetics does NOT account for psychology.) Biological theories of \’mind\’tend to founder on the issue of language, specifically its semantic aspect, or the question of \’meaning\’. When we understand the role language (operationally defined as the \’articulation of thought\’ and that includes mathematics) we will have a better understanding of emotions and their connection (perhaps origin?) in \’mind\’. Nothing I have currently read in the area of neuropsychology/genetics/consciousness
(including Pinker, Dennett, Triviers) suggests that we are any closer today than Freud.
When Freud wrote that \’sometimes a cigar is just a cigar\’ as an admonishment to those who would doom it forever to represent the \’phallus\’ he was wrong: the cigar is ALWAYS a cigar. The object simply is what it is,identified functionally by human beings. It is their subjective perception likewise that extends its \’meaning\’ beyond the (f)actual into the metaphorical. As metaphor, it reveals a good deal about the perciever and nothing whatsoever about the object.
I would also like to add my voice to those who argue that a study of history and literature is essential to understanding human behaviour, particularly emotions. I would go further and say that I myself learned far more from Beckett, Shakespeare and Mann, to cite only a few, than I ever did from Freud or any other psychologist.
P.S. That \’Taboo\’ quiz needs some serious overhauling. It fails to factor in time, eg. the capacity to envisage how a current action has potentially future repercussions. Couldn\’t someone incorporate Chaos Theory into it? Now THAT would be interesting, maybe even genuinely illuminating…
I\’d like to return to history. Allen Esterson\’s Seductive Mirage critiques Freudian ideas, but not against their historical background. The notorious id, ego, superego is an example.
Esterson quotes Freud saying in the New Introductory Lectures that the ego\’s \”three tyrannical masters are the external world, the super-ego, and the id.\” Esterson objects that,
\’… since this is saying little more than that man\’s consciousness is goverened by his environment, his conscience, and his innate instincts, it is hardly a great revelation.\’
Seductive Mirage, p. 230.
Taken in isolation, this seems straightforward. Esterson seems to grant here that all four of the things Freud talks about (external world, id, ego, superego) exist and that Freud’s terms for them correspond to ordinary terminology (environment, instincts, consciousness, conscience). If Esterson really accepted both these things, his complaint would be merely that Freud is not original.
Yet Esterson quickly shows that he does not really accept either of them. Responding to Freud’s response to the objection of unoriginality, Esterson writes \’If we take it that his newly formulated entities are the \”something better\” to take the place of the old ones, they are open to the same criticisms as the latter. Not only are they speculations of a kind not amenable to empirical validation, their functions are so imprecisely delineated that they can be employed in almost arbitrary fashion to provide support for virtually any theoretical formulation.\’
This argument seems to be directed equally against an ancient tradition of tripartite divisions and Freud\’s modern version of them. Yet while Freud is permitted to state his case, tradition is unfairly prosecuted in its absence.
There is nothing to support the charge that these divisions have been used traditionally in the capricious way Esterson claims Freud and his followers used them, constantly inventing new theoretical formulations and imposing them at whim. Hopefully the ancient Greeks were not guilty of this, nor traditional India, with its three gunas of sattva, tamas, rajas.
Empirical validation is not the question. Many things cannot be empircally validated that are nonetheless true, or so useful and basic to our way of thinking that they might just as well be. Most people do not worry about how to empirically validate the distinction between \’man\’s consciousness\’ and the environment. This and the other two divisions are either plausible, coherent, and useful, or else not.
The main earlier arguments against tripartion have recognized this. Descartes, who argued against Plato\’s version of the tripartition, which Freud\’s was modelled after, and Sartre, who argued against Freud\’s version, were not preoccupied with the possibility of empirically validating it, but with its internal coherence.
For Esterson cannot have it both ways. Freud\’s proposed psychic divisions cannot be both a banal reformulation of the obvious and an arbitrary invention. If they are a banal reformulation of the obvious, as Esterson first seemed to be implying, they are true. If they are arbitrary, then they are worthless, but Esterson equivocates: there is an \’almost\’ and a \’virtually\’ in his argument against Freud.
This equivocation shows that the argument is not thought through completely. How can there be degrees of arbitrariness? Usually something is either arbitrary or else it is not, especially when strict scientific standards are being called for. Admitting relative arbitrariness is showing a certain pragmatism.
If Freud revises his speculations, if he goes over things and changes them any number of times, this is because his work is an attempt at thinking through problems in the traditional conceptions that they have not faced before, to see what sense can be made of them and what uses they can be put to when they have been systematically elabourated. Freud certainly does not complete this task, but this hardly means it is not worth undertaking.
What is needed to complete the task is history, starting with ancient history. One must go over Freud\’s sources and see how they developed as they did. This helps clarify Freud, just as Freud helps clarify them.
I\’m sorry, I\’ll qualify something in that last post. Seductive Mirage addresses some of the history behind Freud\’s theories, but not in the id, ego, superego discussion, where theories similar to Freud\’s are criticised without being named.
Warnotck writes that I seem to grant that all four of the things Freud talked about (external world, id, ego and super-ego) exist on the basis of the fact that I wrote that, as they were initially presented (see Warnotck\’s first quotation), Freud is saying \”little more than that man\’s consciousness is governed by his environment, his conscience and his innate instincts\”. But that doesn\’t mean that I concede validity to the way that Freud then goes on to idiosyncratically define and refine the entities to which he has given names, or the functions he ascribes to them. It is in relation to these *more specific properties* of the said entities, and to their applications, that I wrote that \”they are speculations of a kind not amenable to empirical validation [and] their functions are so imprecisely delineated that they can be employed in almost arbitrary fashion to provide support for virtually any theoretical formulation.\” There is the world of difference between an initial simple presentation of his entities that, when translated into ordinary language, reflect what Freud himself acknowledges is \”universally known\”, and his more extended discussion of their functions, and the speculative and often incoherent structures that he builds on them. It is in regard to the *latter* that my critical remarks above are addressed.
So when Warnotck argues that I cannot have it both ways (the proposed psychic divisions cannot be both a banal formulation of the obvious and an arbitrary invention), he is failing to understand that I was referring to two different things (as spelled out in my previous paragraph). Even if this is in part the fault of my exposition at that point, my two approving quotes of MacDougall that followed should have sufficed to make it evident. I quoted MacDougall\’s describing Freud\’s ego-psychology writings as \”a great tangle\” in which Freud got himself caught \”like a great whale caught in a net of his own contriving\”, and also saying that \”if we allowed ourselves the laxity of reasoning which is habitual to Freud, and if we possessed his fertile ingenuity, there is no limit to the possibilities of applications of his principles\”. In other words, given the elasticity of his basic entities and their functions, his tolerance of inconsistencies, and his fertile imagination, Freud can always provide a superficially plausible \’explanation\’ for virtually any subject matter pertaining to the mind, emotions and behaviour. If you like that kind of thing, then that\’s fine. You have plenty to choose from: Freud, Jung, L. Ron Hubbard (Scientology), Christian Science, the system of the Chakras, etc. If you think \’explanation\’ is all that matters, and validation of no great moment, then the choice is wide.
Guy\’s mad
Sean Purcell is probably thinking of me rather than Allen Esterson when he says the guy\’s mad. I may be mad, especially to continue the discussion at this stage, but I also have several good points, and Esterson has not responded to most of them.
Freud and Esterson are both wrong to say that the truths developed further in the id, ego, superego theory are \”universally known.\” Not everyone accepts them. Descartes and Sartre, as I mentioned, denied that the sort of psychic divisions found in Plato or Freud make sense. Many idealists deny that there is an \”external world\”. Many cognitive scientists deny that terms such as \”conscience\” refer to real entities.
If Esterson thinks that \”the conscience\” exists, he has the same obligation to prove this that Freud has to prove that \”the superego\” exists. Many people would say that the two concepts are equally superstitious, and they are not obviously wrong (I would say neither is superstitious, but that also places them on exactly the same level).
Esterson mentions ordinary language. This cannot be the last resort in any discussion. The complicated history of ordinary language has left it with burried assumptions that may or may not make sense. These assumptions are always at work when language is being used, even when something so presumably \”simple\” as Freud’s initial presentation of his entities is involved.
No assumption should be placed above criticism simply because it is not spelt out as part of a theory. Many of the assumptions of ordinary language are the result of past theoretical speculations which were absorbed into it, often changing their meaning in the process. There is no guarantee that they are not incoherent.
All the same criticisms can be made of them that Esterson makes of Freud’s entities: they are \”not amenable to empirical validation [and] their functions are so imprecisely delineated that they can be employed in almost arbitrary fashion to provide support for virtually any theoretical formulation.\”
Ordinary language is as much of a \”great tangle\”, or a net in which we are caught like a great whale, as Freud’s speculations are.
In response to Richard Warnotck, neither Freud nor I say that \”the truths *developed further* in the id, ego, superego theory are \’universally known\’.\” (my emphasis) How what I wrote, either in my previous posting, or in *Seductive Mirage*, can possibly be interpreted as my saying that Freud\’s ideas expressed in his writings on the id, ego and superego are universally known is beyond me.
Warnotck also writes:
> Esterson mentions ordinary language. This cannot be the last resort in any discussion.< Since nothing in the context in which I used the words \”ordinary language\” (see my previous posting) remotely implies what Warnotck says here, the rest of his posting is redundant. I\’m not sure there\’s much to be gained by exchanges in which I have to spend so much time explaining I didn\’t actually say what Warnotck says I said.
Is it not possible, and positive, to try to get others to force to look at things more closely (as with the disagreement over paintings)? And, if we all looked closely enough and from all sides out there, couldn\’t we discover some absolute-ish truth? Ie. couldn\’t Rosie\’s relativism lead to a more harmonious and enlightened absolutism eventually?
This is entering into very pedantic territory, but I don\’t think I have misrepresented Allen Esterson. I will quote him.
\’There is the world of difference between an initial simple presentation of his entities that, when translated into ordinary language, reflect what Freud himself acknowledges is \”universally known\”, and his more extended discussion of their functions, and the speculative and often incoherent structures that he builds on them.\’
It is wrong as a matter of fact that what Freud says in his \”simple\” initial presentation of his entities is \”universally known\” when translated into ordinary language. These supposedly \”universally known\” things are speculative and open to doubt. The problems involved in showing that they are true at all are not different in kind from the problems involved in showing that the details of what Freud says about them are true. Esterson has just blundered here.
There may be confusion about what I was saying, but I think that is Esterson’s fault and not mine. From his most recent post:
\’In response to Richard Warnotck, neither Freud nor I say that \”the truths *developed further* in the id, ego, superego theory are \’universally known\’.\” (my emphasis) How what I wrote, either in my previous posting, or in *Seductive Mirage*, can possibly be interpreted as my saying that Freud\’s ideas expressed in his writings on the id, ego and superego are universally known is beyond me.\’
I meant, of course, that it was those basic truths at the root of the id, ego, superego theory that both Freud and Esterson wrongly said were universally known, not Freud’s further elabouration of them. Esterson’s obviously mistaken view that they are universally known is expressed in my first quote from him.
Just a brief final response to Warnotck\’s latest posting. This whole brouhaha largely comes out of my writing in *Seductive Mirage* that when Freud wrote that that the ego\’s \”three tyrannical masters are the external world, the super-ego and the id\” he was \”saying little more than that man\’s consciousness is governed by his environment, his conscience, and his innate instincts\”. I had no wish to dissect this further, because, as should be evident from the context, my intention was not to engage in a philosophical discussion about the precise nature of human consciousness. It was merely to point out that the statement of Freud\’s quoted above was little more than another way of saying something commonplace. This is evident from my immediately following this with a quotation from Brian Farrell (a philosopher sympathetic towards psychoanalysis) in which he wrote that \”ego-psychology seems to be primarily a way of talking… In consequence of this, perhaps, it has not been of much heuristic value in psychology…\” It was evidently in response to this kind of criticism that Freud wrote that \”in ego-psychology it will be difficult to escape from what is universally known\”.
Now if Warnotck wants to challenge the notion that human consciousness is governed by his environment, his innate instincts, and his conscience (by which I meant, in this context, the ideas he brings to bear on the first two), then that\’s fine. But that really wasn\’t my concern: all I was doing was setting the scene for a criticism of Freud\’s ego-psychology, i.e., the further elaboration of his entities, and his subsequent use of them in developing his schema of the mind.
Now Warnotck tells me that when he wrote of ideas \”developed further in the id, ego, super-ego theory\” he didn’t mean Freud\’s \”further elaboration\” of the terms in which he introduced these basic entities. I think it is evident that it is time to call a halt. We\’re just going round in ever-decreasing circles.
Well, it seems that I am not going to reach agreement with Allen Esterson about this issue any time soon. I am confident, however, that I have pointed to some problems with his presentation of it in Seductive Mirage. I anticipate a somewhat revised treatment in any future edition.