Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Learning From Error

    Questions arose the other day about whether there is any point in discussing whether someone – in particular, Freud – was wrong or not. Is there anything to be gained by looking at errors, mistakes, delusions, wrong directions. I certainly think there is. I think one can learn an enormous amount by studying inquiry that goes wrong, in all sorts of fields. One can learn about epistemolgy, psychology, how evidence interacts with theory and how theory interacts with evidence, how preconceptions and confirmation bias and hopes and wishes can confuse matters. One can learn and re-learn how difficult it can be (how impossible it can be until new instruments are invented) to tell what is really going on.

    I found a wonderful quotation on the subject in Richard Webster’s Why Freud Was Wrong (p. 581 n. 3):

    It may be argued that historians ought to pay more attention than they have done to scientific hypotheses which proved to be failures. The trouble with the history of science, and of scientific medicine, is that it has too often been presented as one long success story; whereas, in fact, a striking feature of the history of science…has been the tenacious persistence of supposedly scientific ideas long after they ought to have been abandoned. I think the historical study of scientific failures is important, not only because it is likely to give us a keener insight into the nature of the scientific process, but also because it may lead us to examine more closely the soundness of some of our own pet ideas. (E.H. Hare, ‘Medical Astrology and its Relation to Modern Psychiatry’)

    Freud makes a fasinating study in the whole subject. Some of his mistakes are quite understandable as results of the absence of those new instruments I mentioned. Everyone was groping in the dark when it came to a lot of organic diseases that were then invisible and now are not – temporal lobe epilepsy, for one. Others are less excusable – excusable in terms of good practice in his own day, I mean. That’s one objection people have been raising in the comments: that of course Freud isn’t a scientist in contemporary terms, but it’s not fair to judge him in contemporary terms. But that’s not right: much of his way of working was not good scientific practice in 1904 any more than it is now, and there were scientists who said so at the time. But – as the case of Melvyn Bragg and his guests makes clear – that’s not as widely known as it might be.

  • Politics Meets Science – and Wins

    Some decisions should be made by peer-review, not politicians.

  • From ‘I Dunno’ to ‘I’ll Ask Jesus’

    Why choose stupidity? Why ask why?

  • They Tidy Up, Your Mum and Dad

    John Fowles’ diary reveals a bad case of Holden Caulfield syndrome.

  • Atheism is as American as Cherry Pie

    Christopher Hitchens reads Susan Jacoby on the hidden history of secular America.

  • Freedom, Freedom, Freedom

    It’s only a ruddy parking ticket.

    But seriously. Speaking of Burke and Kirk, and the joys of tradition and custom…I thought the answer I got to my question at the Chronicle’s colloquy was not all that satisfying. Possibly the fault of my question. I took seriously the instruction to be brief, so my question was pretty simple-minded – then I saw that other people asked very long questions, and I gnashed my teeth in impotent fury. But all the same, I did find the answer a bit off the mark.

    A widespread hostility exists, especially among those of a liberal or libertarian orientation, toward any body of thought that seeks to impose restraints upon the will of either individuals or popular movements. Unable to bear any norm of conduct above that of individual feeling, critics argue that any external or internal restraints placed on the spontaneous will of the individual by society, government, culture, or religion constitute barriers to the fulfillment of his true humanity. Hence, the removal of all moral, cultural, and legal restraints is a prerequisite to the realization of the full potentiality of the individual.

    Yes yes, I know all that. I even agree with it to a considerable extent. I don’t like libertarianism, and I get intensely sick of hearing Americans insist on their right to do anything they want to – you know, drive their SUVs at high speed while chatting on the phone, smoke anywhere they damn please, pay their workers whatever the market will bear. But that doesn’t mean that tradition and custom is always to be preferred to change, and it doesn’t mean that tradition and custom is never antithetical to important, valuable, non-frivolous non-destructive freedoms. It’s traditional and customary for women to be treated like livestock in much of the world. It’s traditional and customary for dalits to be oppressed in India. Those two groups could do with less tradition and more real freedom, if you ask me. And there are other groups in similar situations. I’m not bleating about individual feeling or the spontaneous will, I’m talking about the ability to live a real life as a rational autonomous (i.e. non-dependent and non-subservient) adult. I’m also talking about asymmetrical ‘moral cultural, and legal restraints’ as opposed to just restraints, period. But since I didn’t ask a long enough question, I didn’t make that clear.

  • Lateral Promotion

    Okay, let’s discuss this question of whether Freud is a philosopher, and whether it matters. Should we just all agree to call him a philosopher whether he is one or not because hey who cares? If so, why? If not, why not?

    For one thing there is the question of what words mean. Is it useful for them to have such a broad meaning and application that they mean nothing? Or is it more useful for them to have a narrower, more precise meaning, so that we know what we’re talking about when we use them and so that we have some chance of talking about roughly the same thing as opposed to thinking we’re talking about roughly the same thing when in fact we are talking about diametrically opposed things. Surely it makes a difference in discussions of, say Freud and truth-claims and philosophy, if by ‘philosopher’ one party means, say, someone who tries to justify her arguments, and another party means, say, someone who has some ideas about things and talks about them well.

    This reminds me (parenthetically) of a discussion on Front Row yesterday, a brief chat about the meaning of the words ‘arts’ and ‘culture’. Mark Lawson and David Crystal noted that art has to be ‘inclusive’ rather than ‘elitist’ and that that means more and more activities have to be included in the arts. Why is that though? one wonders, or at least I do. What does ‘inclusive’ mean, for one thing. Does it mean that various activities will feel hurt and excluded if they are not called ‘arts’? Or that people who enjoy doing them or consuming them will? Or both, or something different? And for another thing, why is that an argument for broadening the definition when it’s not in other areas? Cutting up a chicken for dinner isn’t called surgery. Wandering around aimlessly isn’t called gymnastics or polar exploration. Why are the arts expected to be ‘inclusive’ when other fields are not? Sport is not, for one example. Sport is allowed, in fact encouraged, to be ‘elitist’ – so why is it different for the arts? I wonder.

    So, back to philosophy. Is there a difference between a philosopher and a ‘thinker’? Is that a useful distinction? Or are the two categories simply identical. But ‘thinker’ is a pretty broad category, isn’t it? And – correct me if I’m wrong – doesn’t it imply a certain flexibility, a certain license? Aren’t philosophers in fact expected to justify their assertions as opposed to just making them? If they don’t, aren’t other philsophers quick to point that dereliction out to them? Doesn’t the phrase ‘That doesn’t follow’ turn up?

    The trouble with Freud as a philosopher is that he was so very wrong in his own field, his truth-claims have been subject to such thorough and exhaustive examination and found so profoundly wanting, that it seems more than a little fraudulent to airlift him out of science and drop him into philosophy, which as a discipline tends to be quite keen on the truth. It’s as if the idea were ‘Well, Freud made a mess of things in his own field but he was so profound and he wrote so well that we can’t just write him off, so we’ll just move him sideways. Now, where to. Literature? Hmm – no, that won’t do, literary theory is too demanding and rigorous, we can’t just slide people in with no training. Okay, philosophy then. They won’t mind. And if they do mind, tough – it’s about time philosophy became more inclusive and less elitist.’

    Is that what happened? Who knows. It would be interesting to find out…

  • Mistreatment of Prisoners Called Routine in U.S.

    Humiliation, sex slavery, beatings not as rare as they might be.

  • Why Would Icarus Want to be the Ploughman?

    Roger Scruton admires rural silence, settling, grunts, tradition. Ecch.

  • Freud

    Fashionable Nonsense, as we have observed before, is a Hydra with many heads, a book with many chapters, a motel with many rooms, a folder with many files. There is, in short, no end to it. But in the great thronging crowd-scene that is Fashionable Nonsense, there is one exemplar that stands out like Abe Lincoln addressing the Munchkins. Freud and psychoanalysis are in a class by themselves for their ability to go on being taken seriously and at face value by otherwise rational intellectuals, in the teeth of all the evidence.

    It’s not as if it’s a closely-guarded secret. Jeffrey Masson’s publication of the Freud-Fliess letters in 1985, for example, got a lot of attention and sparked much controversy and debate. Hans Eysenck’s Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire in the same year, E. Fuller Torrey’s Freudian Fraud in 1992, Allen Esterson’s Seductive Mirage in 1993, Richard Webster’s Why Freud Was Wrong and Frederick Crews’ The Memory Wars in 1995, Ernest Gellner’s The Psychoanalytic Movement in 1996, Malcolm Macmillan’s Freud Evaluated in 1997, and Frank Cioffi’s Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience and Unauthorized Freud edited by Frederick Crews in 1998 are some of the most prominent of a large number of recent books pointing out Freud’s errors, deceptions, evasions, concealments, and bullying of both patients and colleagues (or followers, which is what they had to be if they wanted to be part of the circle). But the word doesn’t get through – not where it needs to get through. Scientifically based (falsifiable, peer-reviewed, empirical, etc) psychology ignores Freud, but in the humanistic and to some extent in the social scientific branches of inquiry, Freud remains, intact, indeed possibly more influential than ever. For instance the Cambridge series of companions to philosophers inexplicably includes Freud in their number – Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant – and Freud? It’s difficult not to think of this as a dodge. Whatever scientific reputation Freud had is in shreds – so just move him to the philosophy department? He turns out to have been incompetent, dishonest, and cultishly authoritarian in his own chosen line of work, so to save appearances just give him a chair in a different one? His very assertive truth-claims turn out to be all bogus, so naturally the philosophy department is the right slot for him.

    It seems he belongs more in a museum of errors, with studies of the four humours, the benefits of blood-letting, pre-Copernican astronomy, the forensics of witchcraft, alchemy, phrenology and phlogiston. His work on ‘hysteria’ turns out to be worthless, because he and Charcot mistook physical brain-injuries that were too small to see for emotional trauma that caused bodily effects. The operation on Emma Eckstein’s nose to cure her ‘nasal reflex neurosis’ and the half-meter of gauze Fliess and Freud left behind, nearly killing her, is well-known, along with Freud’s whimsical interpretation that Eckstein hemmorhaged in order to entice Freud, because she had a crush on him. The treatment of Dora is another bright spot, as is that of ‘Anna O’ – and on it goes.

    And yet – despite all this, despite the massive documentation and examination of it, literary critics and ‘theorists’ and even some philosophers go on taking Freud seriously – very seriously indeed. (As do psychoanalysts, of course. Psychoanalysis is a highly remunerative field.) Why? That is something of a mystery. It seems to have a lot to do with the idea of the unconscious – which Freud was far from being the first to think about or discuss, but which his partisans seem to think is inextricable from his fate. It also seems to have to do with vague and vaguely-expressed ideas about human depth, complexity, profundity, imagination. The thought appears to be that if Freud goes, human psychology becomes a thing of gears and levers or of pills, with nothing of interest to say. Why this should be remains unclear – so let us investigate.

    OB

    Internal Resources

    Allen Esterson dissects a BBC radio programme on Freud and hysteria

    Allen Esterson examines an error-strewn article in Scientific American by neuroscientist Mark Solms

    Allen Esterson debunks some of the myths surrounding Freud’s seduction theory

    Frederick Crews replies to Norman Holland’s ‘Psychoanalysis as Science’

    Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen on the zero theory of psychoanalysis

    Frank Cioffi on the pseudoscience question

    External Resources

  • So It’s Actually Not Paranoia to Fear ‘Pope-Rule’

    Bishops are leaning on Kerry to oppose abortion rights.

  • Kant and Epicurus Were a Bit Off the Mark

    Simon Blackburn investigates lust; Hobbes calls it a delight of the mind.

  • The TLS Reviews the ‘Rapture’ Series

    The UN as antichrist, superheated blood making people explode – such fun.

  • Einstein’s Mythology

    If you read Allen Esterson’s dissection of the April 22 ‘In Our Time’ on Freud, perhaps you were inspired to listen to the programme. Interesting, wasn’t it? The matter-of-factness, the confidence, with which the participants talked of Freud’s discoveries as if they were settled knowledge (or normal science, as one might say). As Richard Webster amusingly points out, it’s as if people sat around the Radio 4 studio agreeing on how flat the earth is. Just so. Or how pretty the fairies look as they dance around the lawn, or how alarming it is when the poltergeists throw the dishes and boxes of pasta onto the floor, or how long and tedious the trip to Alpha Centauri is and why doesn’t the airline serve better food.

    Possibly the most irritating bit of all is toward the end, when Juliet Mitchell talks enthusiastically about Freud’s correspondence with Einstein after the War. He told Einstein that he – Einstein – would think Freud was talking about mythology – but then so is Einstein himself, Freud and Mitchell concluded, in Mitchell’s case at least with an air of triumph. Oh for heaven’s sake, I muttered, throwing dishes and boxes of pasta onto the floor. Mythology indeed! Oh yes, that’s all it is, that’s all everything is, it’s just stories, it’s just narrative, all of it, astrology, psychoanalysis, physics, geology, therapeutic touch, quantum mechanics – it’s all just a story someone makes up that other people find persuasive and/or explanatory, and that’s all there is to it. You bet.

    Melvyn Bragg did at least take issue with that bit of nonsense, though he didn’t take nearly enough with the rest of the show. But there’s something so – so having it both ways about that maneuver, that it sets the teeth on edge. When talking about Freud, treat his work as well-founded settled knowledge; when talking about Einstein, treat both of them as purveyors of mythology. It’s very similar to the maneuver often used by defenders of religion. When rationalists take issue with the truth claims of religion, pretend that religion has nothing to do with truth claims, it’s merely an attitude of awe and wonder, or an impulse to be good; when rationalists are not around, talk about God and God’s will. On the one hand, Freud is not nonsense, he discovered true things about hysteria, repressed memory, the unconscious, jealousy; on the other hand, Einstein and the rest of the scientific gang are story-tellers. More heads I win tails you lose. It won’t do.

  • Girls Poisoned for Going to School

    Militants angry about Karzai government’s reversal of Taliban ban on female education.

  • Webster on Freud on Hysteria

    Neurology had barely begun, so concussion was diagnosed as hysteria.

  • Richard Webster Listens to ‘In Our Time’

    As flat-earthers are to geography, so Freudians are to medical history.

  • Samuel Johnson Prize Shortlist

    John Clare, the Gulag, Everything, East Germany, Africa.

  • Samantha Power Reads Hannah Arendt

    Why we still have trouble noticing when an abyss opens.

  • What Would Burke Think?

    There is an article about Russell Kirk by Scott McLemee in the current Chronicle of Higher Education. I’ve meant to read some Kirk for awhile, but haven’t gotten around to it. I’ve also meant to read some Burke, but haven’t done much of that either. (Yes, I know; just never mind. I’m studying 7th century vaudeville, and that takes time.) Kirk was a Burkean conservative, not a libertarian cheerleader for capitalism nor a neoconservative.

    What Kirk extracted from Burke’s thought — and found embodied in the work of British and American figures as diverse as John Adams, Benjamin Disraeli, and T.S. Eliot — was a strong sense that tradition and order were the bedrock of any political system able to provide a real measure of freedom…The “reason” that Kirk found so objectionable, writes Mr. McDonald, caused liberals to define themselves “as enemies of authority, prejudice, tradition, custom, and habit.”…By contrast, Kirk’s “moral imagination” enabled people to see their lives as part of, in Burke’s words, “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” The obligation to preserve old institutions and ways of life — and to change them, if at all, only very slowly — was not a matter of nostalgia. “The individual is foolish,” wrote Kirk in The Conservative Mind, “but the species is wise.”

    An interesting idea, but I must say I don’t believe a word of it. I don’t see any reason to think the species is all that wise, for a start. And as for old institutions and ways of life – well, like most if not all of us, I’m the product of a time that got rid of some pretty undesirable and unjustifiable institutions and ways of life, and also saw some re-imposed on other people. Imagine being an urban educated woman in Kabul and seeing the Taliban arrive. ‘Oh good,’ you think, ‘the old institutions and ways of life are coming back, hurrah hurrah. I’ll be locked in the house, I’ll be beaten up if I go outside and accidentally show a toenail, I’ll have to obey my male relatives – I can hardly wait.’ Ideas like Burke’s may sound okay to people who do well out of the old institutions and ways of life, and who don’t mind being surrounded by other people who don’t do so well, but to people who don’t fit that description, the appeal is doubtful. So I’m curious about how Kirk made a case for them.

    Hazlitt has many interesting things to say about Burke in this essay.

    He constructed his whole theory of government, in short, not on rational, but on picturesque and fanciful principles; as if the king’s crowns were a painted gewgaw, to be looked at on gala-days; titles an empty sound to please the ear; and the whole order of society a theatrical procession. His lamentations over the age of chivalry, and his projected crusade to restore it, are about as wise as if any one from reading the Beggar’s Opera, should take to picking of pockets: or, from admiring the landscapes of Salvator Rosa, should wish to convert the abodes of civilized life into the haunts of wild beasts and banditti. On this principle of false refinement, there is not abuse, nor system of abuses, that does not admit of an easy and triumphant defence; for there is something which a merely speculative enquirer may always find out, good as well as bad, in every possible system, the best or the worst; and if we can once get rid of the restraints of common sense and honesty, we may easily prove, by plausible words, that liberty and slavery, peace and war, plenty and famine, are matters of perfect indifference.

    There is a live online colloquy with the author of the book on Kirk at the Chronicle site tomorrow (Thursday) at 11 a.m. my time (US, Pacific) which is 7 p.m. UK time. I sent a question yesterday; you should send questions if you’re inspired to.