Tag: Freud

  • Wrong but so cuddly

    The Guardian hosted an email discussion of Freud and psychoanalysis between Frederick Crews and a psychoanalyst, Susie Orbach. The Guardian intro isn’t very cogent:

    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.

    No, not that either. His stories were gripping, but they’re not stories “of the human mind.” They’re stories of Fearless Mind Detective Siggy “Sherlock” Freud, making all us Watsons gasp as he draws the strained but dogmatic interpretation out of his ass.

    Orbach speaks first, and pours out a stream of tribute to Freud of the “yes maybe his science was all worthless BUT we can’t think about the mind or anything else human without drawing on him” variety. It’s fatuous.

    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.

    Honestly – what can you do with that kind of thing? It’s unfalsifiable! “Yes he was wrong about everything, but that just shows how strong he was.” It’s typical of Freud-huggers.

    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.

    No, they really don’t. They’d be laughed out of the room if they did.

    Fred replies:

    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?

    Her response is to say they’re on different planets, her job is to sit and listen, not ask all these pesky questions.

    Ok so basically psychoanalysis is a brand of mysticism. Fine then, but don’t tell us it shapes how we think about everything.

    To be continued, perhaps.

  • Anything that can be made to look reasonable

    From Richard Webster’s Why Freud Was Wrong:

    …although Freud had initially reacted skeptically to Jung’s interest in the occult, he had eventually come to regard this aspect of his work with almost exactly the same credulity he once bestowed on the ideas of Fliess. “In matters of occultism,” he replies, “I have grown humble since the great lesson Ferenczi’s experiences gave me; I promise to believe anything that can be made to look reasonable.” Freud’s words, “I promise to believe anything that can be made to look reasonable,” might well be used to summarize the intellectual ethos of psychoanalysis itself. For his most enduring achievement was, as has already been argued, to take a fundamentally superstitious and irrational view of the world, deriving directly from the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and re-present it in the vocabulary of modern science. As a result of the extraordinary skill with which he did this, psychoanalysis has continued to offer to intellectuals what it also gave to its founder – a means of using science (or rather the rhetoric of science) in order to fortify traditional religious doctrines against the skepticism of science. [pp 385-6]

    Interesting, I think.

    I don’t find Webster’s arguments for the direct derivation of Freud’s view of the world from “the Judaeo-Christian tradition” all that convincing, just as I don’t find claims that ideas such as equality or human rights derive from that tradition convincing. The point about the appearance as opposed to reality, however, I think is spot-on.

  • Divination, not research

    Frederick Crews has a fascinating pair of articles in the New York Review of Books on Freud’s cocaine addiction and its connection to his work.

    According to the official version of Freud’s career, sexuality scarcely entered his mind as a topic of interest until, to his shock and embarrassment, it was forced upon him by his patients’ indecent confessions. His early psychological papers and his letters to Wilhelm Fliess, however, show just the opposite: it was a sex-obsessed Freud who tried to harangue those patients into admitting that they harbored the perverse desires and guilty secrets that were already on his mind. But when and why had sexual issues become paramount for him? His surviving letters from adolescence are those of a moralizing, misogynistic prude,  and the same qualities appear in his early engagement letters, beginning in 1882.

    Perhaps the best-known result of taking cocaine is sexual disinhibition.

    Crews makes a compelling case that the cocaine use and the sex-obsession are connected. And then there’s the grandiosity…

    [T]hanks to Fleischl’s exhilarating influence and to his own solitary cocaine ingestion, Freud was beginning to feel that a choice was looming between directly intuitive, audacious knowledge and narrowly focused laboratory science. Returning from one nocturnal rendezvous with a suffering but voluble Fleischl, he wrote excitedly of “the intellectual elation, the stimulation and clarification of so many opinions,” and added,  “This magic world of intellect and unhappiness contributes a great deal, of course, to my estrangement from my surroundings.”

    …

    Given the well-known touchiness and grandiosity of habitual cocaine users, it is hard to avoid the inference that the drug contributed to the subsequent prominence of the contentious, self-dramatizing, and persecution-minded side of Freud’s personality.

    …

    Already by 1886, then, Freud was displaying premature certainty, impatience with methodological safeguards, truculence, and a belief that he was destined for great things. Those weren’t traits that blossomed after he developed psychoanalysis and felt a need to defend it. They were the very engine of invention.

    Guru attributes, you might call them. Dunning Kruger for the gifted.

    The use of cocaine favored a certain manner of thinking—associative, self-confirming, visionary, and all-explanatory—that was inappropriate to the traditional practice of science and medicine but well suited to the original mode of inquiry that Freud increasingly favored…Freud’s psychoanalytic inquiries put into play a deliberate lowering of his empirical guard: suspending skepticism, ignoring the judgments of his peers, and ascribing cryptic meaning to his own presumptive memories and to words tendentiously plucked from his clients’ rambling. If a metaphor or a suggestive pun came to his own mind, he would assume it had emanated from his patient’s unconscious and that it constituted evidence for whatever supposition he was favoring at the time. And, still more self-indulgently, he believed that such insight gave him veridical access to the patient’s traumatic past. That was divination, not research, and it entailed the same erasure of commonsense boundaries that occurs in drug states.

    People who are convinced they know things that they can’t possibly know – they never cease to amaze me. It’s interesting to learn that it’s like a cocaine high.