Was
Freud a megalomaniacal, greedy, cocaine-addled opportunist and psychoanalysis a
pseudoscience that has reigned tyrannically over 20th-century thought? Making
use of Freud’s extensive letters to Martha Bernays, Crews paints a “damning
portrait” (Esquire) of a money hungry, adulterous, and uncaring man.
How can
this portrait be reconciled with the radically meaningful and deeply
transformative process many of us know psychoanalysis to be? Is the tyranny of
rationality preferable to the tyranny of myth? Does the unmaking of the myth of
the man undo the gift of his work?
In this
interview Frederick Crews responds to
questions of what it means to have an empirical attitude, how we should “test”
the process of healing, what’s so tempting about Freud, and what should become
of psychoanalysis today. The Crews of the Freud wars is back again, and he’s
going in for the kill shot.
Frederick
Crews talks with Cassandra B. Seltman. New Books Network podcast.
Was
Freud a Scam Artist? LitHub , November 25, 2020.
In a recent column, “Why We’re Still Fighting Over Freud,”
I commented on a debate at NYU about the scientific status of psychoanalysis,
which Freud invented more than 100 years ago. I reiterated my
why-Freud-isn’t-dead argument: yes, psychoanalysis is profoundly flawed, but so
are all other paradigms for explaining and treating the mind, from behaviorism
to psychopharmacology. Afterwards I got an email from Freud’s sharpest critic,
literary scholar Frederick Crews, professor emeritus at the University of
California Berkeley. Crews has been eviscerating Freud with flair for decades,
most recently in Freud: The Making of an Illusion(Metropolitan, 2017; Picador,
2018). I profiled Crews in my 1999 book The Undiscovered Mind, in a chapter
titled “Why Freud Isn’t Dead.” I said his “superficially reserved, even shy
manner concealed a ferocious resolve and self-assurance.” Below is Crews’s
response to my Freud column. – John Horgan
John Horgan and I can trace our acquaintance to April 1998, when we met in New Haven on the eve of a Yale University conference, “Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture.” In that instance, as it happens, the question “whose Freud?” had been settled in advance: Freud belonged exclusively to his admirers. Among twenty-four invited speakers, all of whom were known for their views about depth psychology, I was the only doubter of psychoanalytic doctrine.
I remember one portion of the two-day event very well. My brief talk, which can be read in a subsequent book with the same title (Yale University Press, 2000), was greeted by anomalous gales of laughter bursting out in mid-sentence. It was from John Horgan’s write-up of the proceedings that I learned the reason. A fellow panelist on the stage, the psychoanalyst and eminent Cornell professor Robert Michels, had provoked the audience’s hilarity by making funny faces during my presentation.
I am grateful to John for that bit of enlightenment. From the first, however—even before the Yale meetings began—he and I found ourselves somewhat at odds over Freud’s claims about the mind. For me, a scientifically chastened ex-Freudian, psychoanalytic theory amounted to a pseudoscience. (More about that below.) John, in contrast, already held the position he recently summarized on this blog.
On that occasion John was describing still another Freud debate, this one scrupulously balanced between two defenders and two skeptics. John was reluctant to dispute even the most damaging charges of the naysayers: that Freud misstated his therapeutic results, faked his alleged discoveries, and put forward hypotheses that were so vague and confused as to be operationally meaningless. Nevertheless, he insisted that we cannot yet dispense with Freud.
Two considerations have prompted John to hold steadfastly to that opinion from the 1990s until now. First, he has noted that an assortment of worthy figures, including some neuroscientists as well as grateful patients, remain loyal to the founder of psychoanalysis. This point, however, smacks of circularity. We need to inquire whether those diehard Freudians have expressed independently sound justifications for their loyalty. On that score, the examples John recently provided are not reassuring.
A formerly psychotic legal scholar, John relates, “overcame schizophrenia with the help of psychoanalysis and medications”—leaving us uncertain about the contribution of the former and equally unsure whether that contribution was enabled by validated Freudian postulates. Again, John passes along one debater’s citation of the Nobelist Eric Kandel’s warmth toward Freud. But Kandel’s Freudian affinity was formed in his prescientific Viennese youth, and his brilliant work on the molecular basis of memory owed nothing to psychoanalysis. Yet again, John is impressed by the brain researcher Mark Solms’s likening of Freud to Newton and Darwin. Does John know that Solms is a practicing psychoanalyst who, in contravention of sound empirical procedure, scours neurological data for signs of convergence with the Freudian ideas he already accepts? Solms’s would-be discipline of “neuropsychoanalysis” rests entirely on that epistemic quicksand.
John’s other motive for shielding Freud is more substantive and more widely shared, but it is no less illogical. Like more avid Freudians than himself—the philosopher Jonathan Lear especially comes to mind—John believes that psychoanalytic lore is the sole remaining recourse for those of us who hold out against a mechanistic and pharmacological impoverishment of mental life. “Freud lives on,” we read, “because science hasn’t produced a mind-body paradigm potent enough to knock him off once and for all.”
The unstated premise here is that only Freud offers a properly holistic overview of the psyche. If so, that would be surprising. Hundreds of extant psychotherapies are accompanied by pretensions to plumb the psychological depths. Why single out Freud, who, despite his Romantic poetizing about the seething cauldron of the unconscious, was himself a neurological determinist and reductionist? In the eyes of the lay public, for whatever that is worth, it is the mystical, upbeat Jung and not Freud who cornered the psychological market on soulfulness.
John Horgan and I can trace our acquaintance to April 1998, when we met in New Haven on the eve of a Yale University conference, “Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture.” In that instance, as it happens, the question “whose Freud?” had been settled in advance: Freud belonged exclusively to his admirers. Among twenty-four invited speakers, all of whom were known for their views about depth psychology, I was the only doubter of psychoanalytic doctrine.
I remember one portion of the two-day event very well. My brief talk, which can be read in a subsequent book with the same title (Yale University Press, 2000), was greeted by anomalous gales of laughter bursting out in mid-sentence. It was from John Horgan’s write-up of the proceedings that I learned the reason. A fellow panelist on the stage, the psychoanalyst and eminent Cornell professor Robert Michels, had provoked the audience’s hilarity by making funny faces during my presentation.
I am grateful to John for that bit of enlightenment. From the first, however—even before the Yale meetings began—he and I found ourselves somewhat at odds over Freud’s claims about the mind. For me, a scientifically chastened ex-Freudian, psychoanalytic theory amounted to a pseudoscience. (More about that below.) John, in contrast, already held the position he recently summarized on this blog.
On that occasion John was describing still another Freud debate, this one scrupulously balanced between two defenders and two skeptics. John was reluctant to dispute even the most damaging charges of the naysayers: that Freud misstated his therapeutic results, faked his alleged discoveries, and put forward hypotheses that were so vague and confused as to be operationally meaningless. Nevertheless, he insisted that we cannot yet dispense with Freud.
Two considerations have prompted John to hold steadfastly to that opinion from the 1990s until now. First, he has noted that an assortment of worthy figures, including some neuroscientists as well as grateful patients, remain loyal to the founder of psychoanalysis. This point, however, smacks of circularity. We need to inquire whether those diehard Freudians have expressed independently sound justifications for their loyalty. On that score, the examples John recently provided are not reassuring.
A formerly psychotic legal scholar, John relates, “overcame schizophrenia with the help of psychoanalysis and medications”—leaving us uncertain about the contribution of the former and equally unsure whether that contribution was enabled by validated Freudian postulates. Again, John passes along one debater’s citation of the Nobelist Eric Kandel’s warmth toward Freud. But Kandel’s Freudian affinity was formed in his prescientific Viennese youth, and his brilliant work on the molecular basis of memory owed nothing to psychoanalysis. Yet again, John is impressed by the brain researcher Mark Solms’s likening of Freud to Newton and Darwin. Does John know that Solms is a practicing psychoanalyst who, in contravention of sound empirical procedure, scours neurological data for signs of convergence with the Freudian ideas he already accepts? Solms’s would-be discipline of “neuropsychoanalysis” rests entirely on that epistemic quicksand.
John’s other motive for shielding Freud is more substantive and more widely shared, but it is no less illogical. Like more avid Freudians than himself—the philosopher Jonathan Lear especially comes to mind—John believes that psychoanalytic lore is the sole remaining recourse for those of us who hold out against a mechanistic and pharmacological impoverishment of mental life. “Freud lives on,” we read, “because science hasn’t produced a mind-body paradigm potent enough to knock him off once and for all.”
The unstated premise here is that only Freud offers a properly holistic overview of the psyche. If so, that would be surprising. Hundreds of extant psychotherapies are accompanied by pretensions to plumb the psychological depths. Why single out Freud, who, despite his Romantic poetizing about the seething cauldron of the unconscious, was himself a neurological determinist and reductionist? In the eyes of the lay public, for whatever that is worth, it is the mystical, upbeat Jung and not Freud who cornered the psychological market on soulfulness.
John may want to insist, with Lear, that the Freudian
psychical model is uniquely intricate and nuanced. Complexity, however, is of
zero value if, as in Freud’s case, it is generated merely by methodological
rote. Freud’s standard bag of tricks, not his observations, prompted him to
invert apparent motives, decree that every mental event is a “compromise
formation” with “overdetermined” causes, and perceive genital symbolism, incest
wishes, and latent homosexuality wherever he turned. The only knowledge that can
be extracted from such trademark practices is knowledge about Freud. He granted
himself an absolute license to “Freudianize” without concern for more plausible
explanations, and he routinely misattributed his personal obsessions to others.
Did unconscious urges compel me to attend a debate at New York University on whether psychoanalysis, the theory/therapy invented by Freud, is relevant to neuroscience? Maybe, who the hell knows? But I definitely had conscious motives for going.
I try to make all the events of the NYU Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness, because directors Ned Block and David Chalmers have great taste in topics and speakers. [See Further Reading for my reports on previous meetings.] The debate also gave me an excuse to trot out my old “Why Freud Isn’t Dead” meme, to which I’ll return below.
Long Live Freud!
First, an overview. The event featured four speakers, two critics of Freud and two boosters. I’ll begin with the boosters. Neuropsychologist Mark Solms of the University of Capetown in South Africa employs psychoanalysis as well as brain scans to understand brain-damaged patients. Solms quoted neurologist/author Oliver Sacks, who once write that “neuropsychology is admirable but it excludes the psyche—it excludes the experiencing, active, living ‘I.’”
Solms agreed, adding that modern psychiatry, with its tendency to view mental illnesses as chemical problems requiring chemical solutions, has become “proudly mindless." Psychoanalysis, Solms argued, can bring the psyche back into brain and mind science and remind us “what it is like to be a person.” Solms compared Freud to Newton and Darwin, pioneers who sketched out vast territories that others have mapped in more detail.
Like Solms, Christina Alberini has training in psychoanalysis as well as in neuroscience. She was a postdoc under Eric Kandel, who won a Nobel Prize for discovering the molecular basis of memory in snails. Kandel thinks psychoanalysis has much to offer modern mind-body researchers, and so does Alberini. She called psychoanalysis is a “rich source of information” about our unconscious and maladaptive urges.
Alberini runs a lab at NYU that explores the neural basis of memory in rodents, and psychoanalysis inspires this empirical work. For example, a fundamental Freudian tenet is that traumatic childhood experiences of which we have no explicit memory can nonetheless influence our behavior. Alberini has published evidence that shocks administered to rats in infancy, before they can form lasting memories, nonetheless have an enduring effect on their behavior.
Down with Freud!
Heather Berlin, a cognitive neuroscientist at Mount Sinai Hospital, is sympathetic toward psychoanalysis, more so than most neuroscientists. But the evidence for psychoanalysis is thin, she said, consisting mostly of anecdotes rather than systematic tests.
Psychoanalysts cite Freud as though they are quoting “scripture,” Berlin complained, and yet his ideas are so poorly defined that they are difficult to test. Concepts like “ego” and “id” are nothing but “placeholders,” like “black bile” and other humors with which medieval doctors once explained illness. Psychoanalysis seems to be no more effective at treating mental disorders than other psychotherapies, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy.
Freud’s ideas, notably penis envy, Berlin asserted, reflected his biased, male perspective of his patients, primarily affluent Austrian women. When female analysts objected to the penis-envy hypothesis, Freud accused them of being in denial. Berlin was drawing attention to Freud’s obnoxious heads-I-win-tails-you-lose tactic. If you agree that you suffer from penis envy, he’s right, and if you disagree, he’s still right!
Problems like these, Berlin said, explain why modern neuroscientists rarely cite Freud or other psychoanalysts. “Neuroscience does not need psychoanalysis to validate it or to give context to its findings,” she said.
Robert Stickgold, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard, seemed especially intent on provoking Freudians in the audience. Psychoanalysis is about as useful to neuroscience, he suggested, as creationism is to evolutionary biology. The Freudians booed, but Stickgold plunged ahead. He said that Freud, who aggressively defended his theories in spite of a lack of evidence, would have been at home in the Trump administration. More boos and groans.
Freud’s ideas are not defined rigorously enough to be scientifically tested, Stickgold argued. Psychoanalysis offers no help to scientists trying to understand the brain and mind. Perhaps Freud’s ideas inspire scientists like Alberini and Solms, but so do novels and plays, and we don’t grant them scientific status.
Will Freud Ever Die?
Stickgold concluded by wondering, with exasperation, “why we’re talking about Freud.” Good question. Critics have been bashing Freud for more than a century now. And the complaints of Berlin and Stickgold are mild compared to those of, say, literary scholar Frederick Crews. He depicts Freud as a cocaine-fueled egomaniac who built his reputation by “boasting, cajoling, question begging, denigrating rivals, and misrepresenting therapeutic results.” [Seemy recent conversation with Crews on Meaningoflife.tv.]
But why, if Freud is so bogus, are scientists still arguing about him? Why do serious scholars still defend him, people like Solms, Alberini, Kandel and Sacks? Why does neuroscientist Christof Koch mention Freud favorably in his memoir Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist? Freud’s fans contend that he endures because was a pioneering genius. They see confirmations of his ideas everywhere, and they aren’t entirely delusional.
My favorite corroboration of Freud is a 1998 report in Nature, “Mothers Determine Sexual Preferences.” Kendrick et al describe an experiment in which baby goats were raised by sheep moms and baby sheep by goat moms. The baby goats, when they matured, preferred to copulate with female sheep, and the baby sheep with female goats. The study “indirectly supports Freud’s concept of the Oedipus concept,” the researchers remarked.
But Freud’s merits, such as
they are, can’t entirely account for his endurance, and that brings me to my
why-Freud-isn't-dead thesis. Freud lives on because science hasn’t produced a
mind-body paradigm potent enough to knock him off once and for all. Freud’s
critics are right, psychoanalysis is terribly flawed, but so are rival
mind-body paradigms, including behaviorism, cognitive psychology, evolutionary
psychology and behavioral genetics.
Neuroscience has generated voluminous findings, but
theorists have failed to organize these data into a coherent, satisfying theory
of the mind and brain. NYU has recently hosted workshops on Bayesian and
information-based models of the mind. Each has its merits, but neither is
remotely powerful enough to solve the mind-body problem once and for all.
The dominant mental-health paradigm is psychopharmacology,
which views depression and other disorders as physical problems requiring
physical solutions, notably medications. This is what Solms referred to as
“mindless psychiatry.”
Psychopharmacology has enriched pharmaceutical companies
and psychiatrists over the past few decades. But the causes of mental illness
remain as obscure as ever, and there is evidence that psychiatric
medications--over the long run--harm more people than they help.
If medications for mental illness were as effective as
shills claim, maybe Freud would be dead. Or maybe not, because even in a world
without depression and schizophrenia, we still might turn to Freud when we’re
trying to make sense of our lives, just as we turn to Shakespeare and Jane
Austen.
I first floated my “Why Freud Isn’t Dead” meme in
Scientific American in 1996. I have reiterated it several times since then,
most recently in my book Mind-Body Problems. Chapter Five, “The Meaning of
Madness,” focuses on Elyn Saks, a legal scholar who overcame schizophrenia with
the help of psychoanalysis and medications.
Saks has tried rival treatments, such as
cognitive-behavioral therapy, but she finds psychoanalysis “richer and deeper.”
She calls it “the best window into the mind” and the “most interesting account
of what it is to be human.” Freud was “an amazing writer,” Saks added, whose
case studies “read like novels.”
Will we ever discover a paradigm potent enough to make us
forget Freud? One that will satisfy our yearning to know who we really are? I
hope not, because to be human means to undergo an identity crisis. I think
Freud said that somewhere.
Why We're Still Fighting over Freud. By John Horgan.Scientific American, May 13, 2019.
For a century or more, Sigmund Freud has cast a long
shadow not just over the field of psychoanalysis but over the entire way we
think of ourselves as human beings. His theory of the unconscious and his work
on dreams, in particular, retain a firm grip on the western imagination,
shaping the realms of literature and art, politics and everyday conversation,
as well as the way patients are analysed in the consulting room. Since Freud’s
death in 1939, however, a growing number of dissenting voices have questioned
his legacy and distanced themselves from his ideas. Now Freud is viewed less as
a great medical scientist than as a powerful storyteller of the human mind
whose texts, though lacking in empirical evidence, should be celebrated for
their literary value.
The following debate, conducted through emails, was prompted by the forthcoming publication of Frederick Crews’s book Freud: The Making of an Illusion, which draws on new research materials to raise fresh questions about Freud’s competence and integrity.
Susie Orbach: Some of us come to Freud early, some late. You are in the earlier category, I am in the later one. You claim you left Freud 30 years ago but your continued obsession with the man, with his work, with proving that Freud was contradictory, goes to show the continuing significance, not of Freud the man per se, but of his ideas and impact on a wider, cultural level. His work has had an impact of such magnitude that it’s not possible for us to think about what it means to be human, what motivates us, what we yearn for, without those very questions being Freudian.
Freud’s conceptions of the human mind and its complexity, whether exactly accurate, are not at issue here. What is worth talking about is the way in which late-20th-century and early-21st-century culture have taken up what they have understood of his ideas.
It is very easy to dismantle the specific interpretations of Freud. Every generation does and I have done so myself. That is not to do away with Freud. Rather, it shows the strength of the edifice he created. Many aspects of public policy, from understandings of social and interpersonal violence and racism to the construction of masculinity, sexuality, gender, war, use psychoanalytic ideas not as the explanation but as an explanatory tool aiding economic and statistical understandings of why we do the things we do.
Frederick Crews: No one disputes the enormous extent of Freud’s influence. The question before us is whether we ought, on balance, to be grateful for it. You revere Freud because he helped to make us the sages we are pleased to be – people who can’t even “think about what it means to be human” in non-Freudian terms. But perhaps it is time now to remove those blinders and think afresh.
If, as you say, psychoanalytic theory has functioned as a powerfully shaping “explanatory tool”, surely it matters whether Freud’s explanations ever made empirical sense. If they didn’t, the likelihood is considerable that he raised false hopes, unfairly distributed shame and blame, retarded fruitful research and education, and caused patients’ time and money to be needlessly squandered. Indeed, all of those effects have been amply documented.
In your writings, you assert that Freud’s emphasis on the Oedipus complex was androcentric and wrong; that he misrepresented female sexual satisfaction and appears to have disapproved of it; that envy of the penis, if it exists at all, is not a key determinant of low self-esteem among women; and that his standard of normality was dictated by patriarchal bias, thus fostering “the control and subjugation of women”.
This list, which could be readily expanded, constitutes an indictment not only of harmful conclusions but also of the arbitrary, cavalier method by which they were reached. Yet elsewhere in your texts, you refer to Freud’s “discovery of the unconscious” and to his “discovery of an infantile and childhood sexuality”. Were those alleged breakthroughs achieved in a more objective manner than the “discovery” of penis envy? What are the grounds on which any of Freud’s claims deserve to be credited?
SO: We are on different planets here. My job is to listen, to engage with the world of the analysand, to hear their difficulties, confusions, conflicts, agonies and questions. These don’t come pre-formed. There is nothing formulaic about the conversation in the consulting room. It is a space of exploration.
Knowledge is provisional. It is not static, and the kinds of knowledge of the consulting room exquisitely express this. This is not to say we don’t know anything. Therapists build up considerable knowledge about the way the human mind deals with the indigestible. People don’t come because they are happy, they come because their life has stalled. They perceive themselves to have got stuck, they feel emotionally constipated. They suffer with intrusive self-critical thoughts. Addressing these things is the meat and potatoes of our work. It is out of this engagement that our understandings emerge. Subjectivity, particularly in the process of self-reflection and potential change, is not empirical per se. It is a lived experience, and analysis provides a frame for the individual to investigate their modes of being, feeling and thinking. Psychoanalysis is the study of human subjectivity. It is a clinical practice. It theorises the vicissitudes of human attachment, of the psychological development of mind and body that occur within a relational, cultural field.
FC: But weren’t we talking about Sigmund Freud? Unexpectedly, you have provided the man with an “invisibility cloak”, not only by ceasing to mention him but also by sidestepping all of his novelties, both theoretical and clinical. In your prose, psychoanalysis has ballooned into the cosmically huge and vague “study of human subjectivity” – and who would dare complain about that? Likewise, Freud’s practice disappears within your own, which, as you characterise it, consists of an empathetic listening that is free of preconceptions. That’s admirable if true, but it means that your approach is exactly opposite to that of Freud. Notoriously, he contradicted, discomfited and harangued his patients in the hope of breaking their “resistance” to ideas of his own – ideas that he presumptuously declared to be lurking within the patients’ own unconscious minds.
I find it striking that Freud vanished from your discourse as soon as I asked you to say why we ought to believe any of his propositions. That issue is crucial to an assessment of his legacy. His unsupported claims – for example, that repressed incidents from the first years of life can be reliably unearthed; that, thanks to phylogenetic programming, all toddlers wish to kill their same-sex parent and copulate with the other one; that women are biologically inferior, childlike, devious and masochistic – have yielded many noxious consequences.
One such consequence has been an ongoing disregard, by psychoanalysts and their academic allies, of the principle that hypotheses ought to be held accountable to a preponderance of evidence. Freud’s psychological writings contain not a single item of raw data. We meet only “psychoanalytic findings”, suave stories, evasions and heroic posturing. That charade has seduced many an unwary professor, including yours truly 50 years ago. Even today, regrettably, the Freudian vogue in its least rational (Lacanian) form remains entrenched in the humanities.
Freud, though not on hand to defend himself, has a lot to answer for. What can you enter on the other side of the ledger?
SO: Here’s what I see as our difficulty, – you want the world to see Freud as a scoundrel and a bully, and you want me to repeat my own difficulties with his specific interpretations of unconscious processes. I’m not a throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater type. Just as Newtonian physics has been superseded and Darwin was not the only person working on evolution, physicists and biologists don’t need to trash their predecessor in order to move the field along. The 1950s was a terrible time for psychoanalysis: it turned ideological and was used to send women back to the home after the social changes of the second world war. That’s why the infusion of 70s feminism was so critical to psychoanalysis’s reinvigoration and rethinking. Out of that has grown a more nuanced understanding of early attachment and how its impact is elaborated, of the complicated feelings and identities children have towards their parents, of the way in which mothers are not simply the failing objects of their children but are women struggling with their own legacies and subjectivity, of the fragility of masculinity.
Freud can be easily attacked for his understanding of homosexuality but have you looked at his understandings of primary bisexuality? Of course you have and you know how much early experience and our cultural, familial, class and geographic setting contributes to our personal understandings of who we are and can be.
I can see that the colonisation of literary criticism by aspects of psychoanalysis must have been wearying for you. It always amuses and sometimes irritates me when other fields take up psychoanalysis, for they tend to freeze it and use concepts that practitioners have either jettisoned or contested. I know physicists and mathematicians who groan when their work is appropriated by literary types and used as metaphor, so I empathise with your annoyance, but an argument about a Freud that I don’t use makes no sense to me when there is so much in the Freud legacy that does. Yes. I still find him illuminating.
The following debate, conducted through emails, was prompted by the forthcoming publication of Frederick Crews’s book Freud: The Making of an Illusion, which draws on new research materials to raise fresh questions about Freud’s competence and integrity.
Susie Orbach: Some of us come to Freud early, some late. You are in the earlier category, I am in the later one. You claim you left Freud 30 years ago but your continued obsession with the man, with his work, with proving that Freud was contradictory, goes to show the continuing significance, not of Freud the man per se, but of his ideas and impact on a wider, cultural level. His work has had an impact of such magnitude that it’s not possible for us to think about what it means to be human, what motivates us, what we yearn for, without those very questions being Freudian.
Freud’s conceptions of the human mind and its complexity, whether exactly accurate, are not at issue here. What is worth talking about is the way in which late-20th-century and early-21st-century culture have taken up what they have understood of his ideas.
It is very easy to dismantle the specific interpretations of Freud. Every generation does and I have done so myself. That is not to do away with Freud. Rather, it shows the strength of the edifice he created. Many aspects of public policy, from understandings of social and interpersonal violence and racism to the construction of masculinity, sexuality, gender, war, use psychoanalytic ideas not as the explanation but as an explanatory tool aiding economic and statistical understandings of why we do the things we do.
Frederick Crews: No one disputes the enormous extent of Freud’s influence. The question before us is whether we ought, on balance, to be grateful for it. You revere Freud because he helped to make us the sages we are pleased to be – people who can’t even “think about what it means to be human” in non-Freudian terms. But perhaps it is time now to remove those blinders and think afresh.
If, as you say, psychoanalytic theory has functioned as a powerfully shaping “explanatory tool”, surely it matters whether Freud’s explanations ever made empirical sense. If they didn’t, the likelihood is considerable that he raised false hopes, unfairly distributed shame and blame, retarded fruitful research and education, and caused patients’ time and money to be needlessly squandered. Indeed, all of those effects have been amply documented.
In your writings, you assert that Freud’s emphasis on the Oedipus complex was androcentric and wrong; that he misrepresented female sexual satisfaction and appears to have disapproved of it; that envy of the penis, if it exists at all, is not a key determinant of low self-esteem among women; and that his standard of normality was dictated by patriarchal bias, thus fostering “the control and subjugation of women”.
This list, which could be readily expanded, constitutes an indictment not only of harmful conclusions but also of the arbitrary, cavalier method by which they were reached. Yet elsewhere in your texts, you refer to Freud’s “discovery of the unconscious” and to his “discovery of an infantile and childhood sexuality”. Were those alleged breakthroughs achieved in a more objective manner than the “discovery” of penis envy? What are the grounds on which any of Freud’s claims deserve to be credited?
SO: We are on different planets here. My job is to listen, to engage with the world of the analysand, to hear their difficulties, confusions, conflicts, agonies and questions. These don’t come pre-formed. There is nothing formulaic about the conversation in the consulting room. It is a space of exploration.
Knowledge is provisional. It is not static, and the kinds of knowledge of the consulting room exquisitely express this. This is not to say we don’t know anything. Therapists build up considerable knowledge about the way the human mind deals with the indigestible. People don’t come because they are happy, they come because their life has stalled. They perceive themselves to have got stuck, they feel emotionally constipated. They suffer with intrusive self-critical thoughts. Addressing these things is the meat and potatoes of our work. It is out of this engagement that our understandings emerge. Subjectivity, particularly in the process of self-reflection and potential change, is not empirical per se. It is a lived experience, and analysis provides a frame for the individual to investigate their modes of being, feeling and thinking. Psychoanalysis is the study of human subjectivity. It is a clinical practice. It theorises the vicissitudes of human attachment, of the psychological development of mind and body that occur within a relational, cultural field.
FC: But weren’t we talking about Sigmund Freud? Unexpectedly, you have provided the man with an “invisibility cloak”, not only by ceasing to mention him but also by sidestepping all of his novelties, both theoretical and clinical. In your prose, psychoanalysis has ballooned into the cosmically huge and vague “study of human subjectivity” – and who would dare complain about that? Likewise, Freud’s practice disappears within your own, which, as you characterise it, consists of an empathetic listening that is free of preconceptions. That’s admirable if true, but it means that your approach is exactly opposite to that of Freud. Notoriously, he contradicted, discomfited and harangued his patients in the hope of breaking their “resistance” to ideas of his own – ideas that he presumptuously declared to be lurking within the patients’ own unconscious minds.
I find it striking that Freud vanished from your discourse as soon as I asked you to say why we ought to believe any of his propositions. That issue is crucial to an assessment of his legacy. His unsupported claims – for example, that repressed incidents from the first years of life can be reliably unearthed; that, thanks to phylogenetic programming, all toddlers wish to kill their same-sex parent and copulate with the other one; that women are biologically inferior, childlike, devious and masochistic – have yielded many noxious consequences.
One such consequence has been an ongoing disregard, by psychoanalysts and their academic allies, of the principle that hypotheses ought to be held accountable to a preponderance of evidence. Freud’s psychological writings contain not a single item of raw data. We meet only “psychoanalytic findings”, suave stories, evasions and heroic posturing. That charade has seduced many an unwary professor, including yours truly 50 years ago. Even today, regrettably, the Freudian vogue in its least rational (Lacanian) form remains entrenched in the humanities.
Freud, though not on hand to defend himself, has a lot to answer for. What can you enter on the other side of the ledger?
SO: Here’s what I see as our difficulty, – you want the world to see Freud as a scoundrel and a bully, and you want me to repeat my own difficulties with his specific interpretations of unconscious processes. I’m not a throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater type. Just as Newtonian physics has been superseded and Darwin was not the only person working on evolution, physicists and biologists don’t need to trash their predecessor in order to move the field along. The 1950s was a terrible time for psychoanalysis: it turned ideological and was used to send women back to the home after the social changes of the second world war. That’s why the infusion of 70s feminism was so critical to psychoanalysis’s reinvigoration and rethinking. Out of that has grown a more nuanced understanding of early attachment and how its impact is elaborated, of the complicated feelings and identities children have towards their parents, of the way in which mothers are not simply the failing objects of their children but are women struggling with their own legacies and subjectivity, of the fragility of masculinity.
Freud can be easily attacked for his understanding of homosexuality but have you looked at his understandings of primary bisexuality? Of course you have and you know how much early experience and our cultural, familial, class and geographic setting contributes to our personal understandings of who we are and can be.
I can see that the colonisation of literary criticism by aspects of psychoanalysis must have been wearying for you. It always amuses and sometimes irritates me when other fields take up psychoanalysis, for they tend to freeze it and use concepts that practitioners have either jettisoned or contested. I know physicists and mathematicians who groan when their work is appropriated by literary types and used as metaphor, so I empathise with your annoyance, but an argument about a Freud that I don’t use makes no sense to me when there is so much in the Freud legacy that does. Yes. I still find him illuminating.
For this role of ghostly ancestor, the actual man Freud isn’t needed or even wanted. But the historical Freud is the one whose legacy we are supposed to be debating. Did he tell the truth about his achievements? Were his methods ever trustworthy? And what effects have his dogmas wrought not just on therapy but also on social attitudes, psychological research, academic discourse and public health?
Beginning around 1970, independent scholars such as Henri F Ellenberger, Frank Cioffi, and Paul Roazen began to chip away at the legendary Freud who had been canonised in the 1950s by Anna Freud, Ernest Jones, and others. The process has continued to this day. Freud, we now know, regularly lied about his breakthroughs, double-crossed benefactors, and slandered his rivals, and through ad hoc tinkering with a dubious theory, he created a great jumble of conflicting notions, bordering at times on mysticism.
Until fairly recently, the psychoanalytic community put up a united front against all such “Freud bashing”. Now, occasionally, we see Freud accurately depicted as a peremptory, undisciplined and power-hungry speculator – or, as he put it himself in a letter that his daughter suppressed, as “not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker” but just a headlong “conquistador”. Some honest Freudians even grant that Freud was a sick man who tried to saddle the whole human race with his anxious fantasies. But the necessary next step – to admit that psychoanalysis never had a sound raison d’être – isn’t taken, because to do so would deprive the Freudian authors of their worldview and, paradoxically, of their chosen technique for deconstructing Freud’s psyche.
The peril of trying to be specific about Freud without keeping up with the scholarship may be illustrated by your mention of one notion that ought to please me: “primary bisexuality”. I don’t think you have considered how Freud’s apprehension of that phenomenon differed from your own. More important, it wasn’t Freud’s idea at all. He lifted it directly from the wild theorising of his madcap friend Wilhelm Fliess.
SO: I am not such an ignorant person that I would lump Cioffi with Roazen and Ellenberger. Yes, Roazen revealed the Freud who fell out spectacularly with many colleagues, the Freud who analysed his daughter and so on, but he credits Freud with a seminal place in the history of the human mind, and documented his life and work in his many books.
Ellenberger demonstrated in 1970 that the notion of the “talking cure” and the revelation of the “pathogenic secret” have their roots in ancient time, and that far from detracting from Freud his work can thus be set in a wide historical context. He sees Freud as deserving pride of place for the work he undertook to conceptualise hidden secrets, repressed memories and the like in a systematic fashion, which then linked to a formalised method of treatment. Yes, Ellenberger discovered that Breuer’s case Anna O did not have a swift or straightforward recovery, but for him that didn’t invalidate psychoanalysis or Freud.
Nor does your accusation that the good ideas are simply other people’s ideas. Indeed, this is inevitable. Ideas are an outcome of time, place and connection. I’m not naively saying there is no envy, competition or theft in intellectual ideas, but I can’t go with the malevolent version.
Freud himself might have wryly remarked that it is the job of the next generation(s) to dismantle the work of the father, the progenitor, and yet for the work to still stand. And so it does. The listening/talking cure is alive and well and growing.
FC: Thanks, Susie, for your part in a civil dialogue. Not surprisingly, we haven’t changed each other’s minds. I hope, though, that some readers will have grasped why such differences are inevitable. So long as Freud is prized as an iconic leader who lent his blessing to one’s own therapeutic tradition, he is bound to remain at least partly veiled in myth.
The Freud who lived and breathed was by no means the progenitor of empathetic talk therapy. A better candidate for that honour would be the Swiss Paul Dubois, who addressed himself not to his patients’ supposed infantile memories or to their hothouse “transference” but to their here-and-now insecurity within their life situations. If Dubois remains in outer darkness today, it isn’t because he failed – all varieties of cognitive treatment are indebted to him – but because Freud bested him in the art of unrelenting gamesmanship and self-promotion.
Henri Ellenberger was no admirer of Freud’s; he regarded him as having stolen major credit from Pierre Janet. As Paul Roazen wrote, “The theme of plagiarism can be found almost everywhere one turns in Freud’s career.” This was a question not of occasional borrowing, and still less of openly shared endeavour, but of chronic dishonesty and the malicious sabotage of others’ reputations. Without such behaviour on Freud’s part, he might be as unknown today as the meritorious Paul Dubois.
How we feel about Freud: Susie Orbach and Frederick Crews
debate his legacy. The Guardian. August 20, 2017.
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