Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen says Freud’s followers were opportunists. Perhaps he is right about this, but in the interests of fairness, let us recognize that it is not only psychoanalysts who are capable of behaving opportunistically. Consider for example the opportunism of his ally Frederick Crews over homosexuality.
Cast your mind back to 1980 and Frederick Crews’s essay Analysis Terminable. In a postscript to that article, Crews expressed his views on the harm psychoanalysis had caused American society as follows: ‘As a member of a society steeped in Freudian platitudes, I would like people to know that the guilt dispensed by psychoanalytic theorists to striving women and to the parents of homosexuals, “neurotics”, and psychotics can be plausibly declined.’ (Reprinted in Skeptical Engagements, p. 41).
Since placing “neurotics” in scare quotes implicitly denies that neurosis exists, Crews effectively places homosexuality on a level with the most severe kind of mental illness. He implies that if, say, a mother somehow caused her child to become a homosexual, then she should be as ashamed as if she had caused her child to become a psychotic.
Now fast forward to 1993 and the memory wars. Crews had this to say about the harms caused by psychoanalysis:
‘Parents have agonized about having caused their children’s homosexuality, and gays have been told that their sexual preference is a mental disorder.’ (The Memory Wars, p. 71).
That is a highly confused and extremely ugly statement, for two main reasons:
1. Crews implies, hopefully without really realizing what he is saying, that parents do not care whether homosexuality is a mental illness or not just so long as they are not responsible for it. Had Crews wanted to avoid giving that impression, he should have said that BOTH gays AND their parents have been told that homosexuality is a mental illness (and as a literary critic, I don’t think Crews can object to close reading of his own rhetoric).
2. Crews places the blame for the idea that homosexuality is a mental illness on psychoanalysis. He ignores his own past assertions in Commentary, which show that one certainly does not have to be a Freudian to equate homosexuality with mental illness. Crews should in any case know perfectly well that the idea that homosexuality was a mental illness was one not held by Freud himself.
Now, as most for us know, concern for homosexuals had become fashionable by the 1990s, whereas it was not so fashionable in the early 1980s. For Crews to suddenly manifest such concern for homosexuals in the 1990s, whereas he had previously lumped them with psychotics, is therefore a brazen and deeply disgusting piece of opportunism.
Should there ever be a shift back in the direction of sexual conservatism, which I suspect is quite likely, then the way Crews updated his anti-Freudian rhetoric to make it more acceptable to a PC age will be used to show that liberals were always hypocrites.
A response to Warnotck’s remarks on Frederick Crews:
I suspect Crews put “neurotics” in inverted commas because in popular usage it is so ill-defined. Insofar as it has a more precise meaning it is in contradistinction to “psychosis”, i.e., it covers mental disorders such as forms of depression and severe anxiety states, of which of course Crews does not deny the existence. But in everyday life (and in literature) it is used more broadly and in a fashion that almost defies definition, hence the inverted commas.
Only in Warnotck’s mind could the sentence in question imply that Crews places homosexuality on the same level with psychoses. Crews is simply pointing out that in dispositions as diverse as that of homosexuality and some mental disorders psychoanalysts have historically posited that they are the result of parental behaviours in relation to their children.
Concerning the numbered points:
1. Warnotck gives a tendentious reading of the sentence in question which is idiosyncratic and unwarranted.
2. That other ‘authorities’ have labelled homosexuality a mental disorder does not refute Crews’s assertion that in the past orthodox psychoanalysts have contended that homosexuality is caused by early childhood experiences and that it can be ‘cured’. In the United States in particular, it was the immense prestige enjoyed by the psychoanalytic community that made the contention in question plausible for many people.
Incidentally, Freud may not have described homosexuality as a mental illness, but he certainly described it as a “sexual aberration” and homosexuals as “inverts”.
The last two paragraphs of Warnotck’s posting bear so little relation to Crews’s views that they scarcely warrant a rebuttal.
Only someone determined to construe Crews’ comments in a bad light could interpret them in the terms Warnotck insists on. His misconstruing of them makes what he writes in his latest posting completely off target (and the first sentence gratuitously offensive towards Crews as well as being misconceived).
Perhaps it’s worth noting here the succinct response of Sean Purcell to one of Warnotck’s postings in the previous exchanges on Freud and psychoanalysis: “Guy’s mad.” While I’m sure Sean didn’t intend this to be taken too literally, the level at which Warnotck pitches his latest contribution, and particularly the last paragraph and the absurd misrepresentation of Crews’s position in the last two paragraphs of his previous posting to which he is alluding therein, indicates the futility of engaging in debates with him.
Allen Esterson would have us believe that Frederick Crews’s repellent comments do not mean what they seem to mean taken at face value. Can he not see the irony of this? Anti-Freudians have long warned us against seeing hidden meanings in everything, so they are in no position to complain if someone decides that their major spokesman meant exactly what he wrote.
Given the vehement and emotional nature of Crews’s claims about the harm wrecked by psychoanalysis, it will not do to say that he was simply noting that homosexuality and psychosis were both held to be caused by parental behaviour. The only reason why their causation should matter is if homosexuality and psychosis are both bad things. For Crews to mention them together implies that he considers them equally bad.
To say that only I could think that is an ad hominem argument which does not address the issue. I am not the only person in this world who does not like Crews. If Esterson tries asking some of the others what they thought Crews meant, I suspect many or most of them will agree with me about this.
Regarding my other points, could Esterson please say why he thinks my understanding of what Crews wrote in the Memory Wars is “idiosyncratic and unwarranted”? “Because Frederick Crews is such a nice person”, is not a good enough answer. I do think that literary critics should pay attention to language and nuances of meaning.
The last two paragraphs of my posting have everything to do with Crews’s views, in my opinion. They also concern important social issues which in one way or another affect everyone. Esterson can ignore them now if he wishes, but sooner or later they will have to be dealt with.
I would like to record my agreement with Allen Esterson. Richard Warnotck’s interpretation of Crews’s remarks is laughably twisted.
Here is what Crews originally wrote:
“I would like people to know that the guilt dispensed by psychoanalytic theorists to striving women and to the parents of homosexuals, “neurotics”, and psychotics can be plausibly declined.”.
Now it should be obvious to anyone that Crews is attacking Freudianism for creating unnecessary feelings of guilt. That is the sole intent of the comments quoted. Crews is not engaged in passing judgment on anything else, so he does not comment on why a parent being told he/she caused an offspring’s homosexuality would be thereby upset. His sole interest is in the truth content of Freudianism.
From this quote, Warnotck immediately infers that Crews has a problem with homosexuals. Did Crews write something of the sort that Pat Robertson and his ilk come out with? No. It’s all Warnotck’s inference.
Let’s play Warnotck’s game on Warnotck himself. Note once again Crews’s original quote: “I would like people to know that the guilt dispensed by psychoanalytic theorists to striving women and to the parents of homosexuals, “neurotics”, and psychotics can be plausibly declined.”
Did you notice the “striving women”? Warnotck does not mention them at all. So we can infer that he has no problem with the guilt caused in such women by Freudianism.
And should Warnotck now reply that he has no such opinions, he will be guilty, in his own words, of “opportunism”.
I am accused of being offensive to Frederick Crews. With respect, I do not think that someone so given to inflammatory rhetoric and overstatement as Crews deserves to be treated with kid gloves. To make vehement criticisms of psychoanalysis is to invite a vehement response.
I’m sure I have nothing more to say about Crews’s comments on homosexuality. I believe I have proved my point.
“Theories are not like Mt. Everest. We don’t undertake the arduous task of assessing them merely because they are there. We want reasons for thinking they might be true.”
I believe I have an answer to this. Whether or not one personally considers that a theory could be true should not be the question. The fact is that some Freudian theories are or have been widely believed and this has important consequences. We need to know whether they are correct or not. Suggesting they may be worthless, without trying to test them, will not solve the problem.
You know, I had been prepared to give this up and go away. I really had. I can get tired of this sort of thing, just as anyone else can. Not responding to me would probably be a good way of getting rid of me. Yet, since Paul Power declares me deluded, I will respond.
What does Power think I am deluded about? About the fact that Frederick Crews has engaged in much inflammatory rhetoric and overstatement over the years? Is Crews then the very embodiment of moderation, politeness, and restraint? Surely not.
Neither is it a delusion to think that angry criticisms often prompt angry responses, or that angry responses are often deserved in such cases. If critics want to let loose passionate emotion in their criticisms, then equally passionate comments on those emotions are the thing needed in response.
So I have no apology there. ‘Analysis Terminable’ is a violent piece of rhetoric. It is Crews’s primal scream. It is deeply offensive to many different categories of people. Presumably there were some personal issues behind it, Crews had some things he needed to get off his chest, etc.
The most objectionable thing about it is the undertone of contempt for the people Crews claims to be concerned about. Those ‘striving women’, for example.
Why did Crews think that ‘striving women’ need him to be feminist? ‘Striving women’ can take care of themselves very well, I think. They don’t need Crews to rescue them from the wicked Freudians, ready to make them feel guilty by talking about penis envy. ‘Striving women’, by definition, are strong and capable. Yet Crews really seems to think that, without a brave, strong man like him to help them, they would be overwhelmed by guilt, their ‘strivings’ not much use. This attitude is actually sexism, not feminism.
Eh, Richard: You’re at it again. Making huge unfounded leaps of inference without any basis in anything except your own absurd twisted misreadings, which I am coming to the
conclusion are deliberate because you have nothing else.
Paul Power says I am misreading Frederick Crews. Power, for his part, is not reading Crews at all. He does not discuss the details of what Crews wrote or ask precisely what it means. I am assuming that Crews meant precisely what he wrote and nothing more.
“I would like people to know that the guilt dispensed by psychoanalytic theorists to striving women and to the parents of homosexuals, “neurotics”, and psychotics can be plausibly declined.”
From this Richard Warnotck claim that Crews has a problem with homosexuals and that Warnotck assumes “that Crews meant precisely what he wrote and nothing more”.
Let’s look at that Crews sentence:
1) I would like people to know that
2) the guilt dispensed by psychoanalytic theorists
3) to striving women and to the parents of homosexuals, “neurotics”, and psychotics
4) can be plausibly declined
It should be obvious that this sentence is Crews bringing the good news that the guilt Freudianism caused in the people listed in 3) is unnecessary (because Freudianism is a lie). And that’s all. The rest is all in Richard Warnotck’s mind.
And I just love this: “You know, I had been prepared to give this up and go away”. Really, it’s too too much, coming from the person whose absurd misreadings started this debate.
And BTW Richard: as I pointed out earlier, you are hoist by your own petard. Using your own logic you have contempt for “striving women”. Claiming that Crews patronises them is no defence. How about answering that?
It has occurred to me that Richard Warnotck is committing a variation on a fallacy ably explained on ths website by Julian Baggini, at http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/badmovesprint.php?num=52. Although the fallacy is given as “Partial defence = support”, Baggini deals only with one type of example, where a defence of one policy of a political party is mistaken for support of all that party’s policies.
To see why Warnotck’s is another variation on this fallacy, take a sentence in the same form as Crews’s first comment: “I am happy that with the fall of Berlin in 1945, the Nazi death threat was no longer hanging over Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, Slavs and those sentenced to execution for killing while drunk-driving”. The Warnotck variation is to assume that the author of this remark, in his partial defence of drunk-driving killers (implying they should not be executed for their crime) , is also saying that there is nothing wrong with killing while drunk driving.
While is is certainly possible that an instance of partial defence is the expression of total support, there is no logical imperative at work so this general argument remains a fallacy
Had Frederick Crews really wanted to relieve the guilt of parents with homosexual children there would have been a simple way of doing it: explain that homosexuality is OK and that it doesn’t matter what causes it.
For Crews to deny that parents should feel guilt ‘because Freudianism is a lie’, as Paul Power puts it, only makes sense if one accepts that homosexuality is a bad thing and that parents would rightly feel guilty if they were responsible. (Incidentally, honest scientists admit that the origins of sexual orientation are still an open question and that some role for environmental and family influences cannot be ruled out).
‘Can be plausibly declined’ was a very odd choice of words in this context. If I were a guilt-wracked parent, I wouldn’t want to be told that the idea that I wasn’t responsible for the homosexuality of my children was just ‘plausible.’ I’d want to be absolutely sure I wasn’t responsible. To say that the guilt can be ‘plausibly declined’ leaves open the possibility that I might be responsible after all. This is another sign that Crews lacked any genuine compassion for parents and was only exploiting the issue of homosexuality for his anti-Freudian crusade.
Had Crews wished to express hatred for homosexuals, there would have been a simple way of doing it: explain that homosexuality is not OK .
“For Crews to deny that parents should feel guilt ‘because Freudianism is a lie’, as Paul Power puts it, only makes sense if one accepts that homosexuality is a bad thing and that parents would rightly feel guilty if they were responsible”. And therefore to express relief that those who killed while drunk driving did not have to face execution by the Nazis only makes sense if one accepts that killing while drunk-driving is not a bad thing?
Paul Power’s logic seems to be that if someone does not say something in as many words, rather than using language that it implies it, that cannot be what they really meant. In using this logic, Power effectively admits that Crews was not trying to relieve the guilt of parents with homosexual children. Thank you for at least admitting that much.
Richard Warnotck just cannot kick his dirty little habit of misinterpreting. As I tried to explain, an attack on an attack on X does not imply support for X.
At this point I would like him to tell me why expressing relief that those who killed while drunk driving did not have to face execution by the Nazis only makes sense if one accepts that killing while drunk-driving is not a bad thing?
“An attack on an attack on X does not imply support for X” ? How does this apply here?
What is ‘X’? Is ‘X’ homosexuality? No, I suppose it must be anti-homosexual views.
So let’s see. Does an attack on an attack on anti-homosexual views imply support for anti-homosexual views? Yeah, I think it does. In practice, that is what it implies.
I’m not going to discuss Nazis and drunk driving with Paul Power, because this isn’t the subject that needs considering here.
In response to Dee Nic Aibhne, I should point out that my recent posts have been about Frederick Crews, not about Sigmund Freud. If I am guilty of anything, then, it is giving Crews more attention than he is worth.
Perhaps more relevantly, Frank Cioffi’s arguments about pseudo-science don’t actually show that Freud was wrong about, say, the cause or causes of homosexuality.
One cannot simply declare that Freud was a pseudo-scientist, so therefore he must have been wrong about homosexuality. There has to be empirical investigation into homosexuality to answer that.
Richard Warntock writes in relation to the Frank Cioffi piece on B&W:
“One cannot simply declare that Freud was a pseudo-scientist, so therefore he must have been wrong about homosexuality. There has to be empirical investigation into homosexuality to answer that.”
Now of course Cioffi doesn’t simply “declare” that Freud was a pseudo-scientist, he bases his views on many decades of close reading of Freud’s theses. Examples of the results of this study can be found throughout his book *Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience* (1998). Nor does he argue that because Freud was a pseudoscientist he must have been wrong about everything. In principle each claim has to as to be taken on its merits. In practice one has to take into account that they overwhelmingly depend on psychoanalytic inferences based on Freud’s idiosyncratic interpretative procedures and his ideas about the nature of the “Unconscious” as he conceived it. After one has examined numerous examples of the evidence Freud provides for his claims and found them wanting, it is justifiable to decide that other claims based on similar modes of evidential contentions do not warrant serious consideration.
On the specific issue of homosexuality, Warnotck writes that “Frank Cioffi’s arguments about pseudo-science don’t actually show that Freud was wrong about, say, the cause or causes of homosexuality… There has to be empirical investigation into homosexuality to answer that.”
Few would dispute this last contention. However Freud is one exception. He wrote that he “could not put much value on [experimental studies] because the abundance of reliable observations on which [psychoanalytic] propositions rest make them independent of experimental verification.” By “reliable observations” he meant the kind of inferential psychoanalytic findings obtained in the course of the psychoanalyses of patients, and of his imaginative cogitations. This kind of approach led to his providing several *different* explanations for homosexuality, derived on the basis of whatever topic he was engaged on at the time. [A. Esterson, *Seductive Mirage*, p. 192] (For instance, when he was dealing with “Little Hans”, he came up with an explanation invoking the castration complex.) The elastic versatility of his interpretive procedures meant that his findings included that he “had never yet come through a single psychoanalysis of a man or woman without having to take into account a very considerable current of homosexuality.” When one investigates specific examples of how he arrived at such a conclusion (e.g., in the Wolf Man case history) one understands why Cioffi questions “whether the grounds advanced for crediting Freudian theory are good enough to warrant further enquiry”.
Richard Warnotck asks what I mean by X. In this context X are parents of homosexuals who believe that homosexuality is wrong. The attack on them is Freudianism’s lie that they caused their offspring’s homosexuality.
The attack on this attack is Crews’s exposure of the lie. Warnotck is no more justified in his claim about Crews than I am in inferring that Warnotck thinks it ok to lie to people to make them suffer for beliefs he finds objectionable.
“Does an attack on an attack on anti-homosexual views imply support for anti-homosexual views?” No it does not. If the attack on anti-homsexual views was based on bad logic or racism or some similar form of intolerance, then pointing out these flaws would be good work regardless of one’s views on homosexuality.
Warnotck also does well to avoid my challenge involving Nazi executions of drunk-driving killers because it shows the emptiness of his argument. My challenge asks him to stand by his argument in an uncongenial context so he has to avoid it at all costs. Logically there is no difference between his argument that Crews is anti-homosexual and the claim that to oppose the execution of killer drunk-drivers is the same as thinking such killing is acceptable. His evasion suggests strongly that he is a knave rather than a fool.
If anyone still doubts that Frederick Crews held anti-gay views as late as 1980, there is another statement in Analysis Terminable that I should draw attention to:
‘Critics have pointed out that the third edition of DSM (1980), like its predecessors, reflects political as well as medical and scientific opinion. Quite true: when smoking replaces homosexuality as a mental aberration, more of the credit must go to caucuses than to new findings.’ (Skeptical Engagements, p. 36).
Only someone convinced both that smoking is not a ‘mental aberration’ and that homosexuality is one would say that. It makes no sense otherwise. Compare what Analysis Terminable says about homosexuality to what the Memory Wars says about it, and you will see that Crews reversed himself on the issue. He attacked Freud from an anti-gay position in 1980, then changed tactics and attacked Freud from a pro-gay position in the 1990s.
Crews’s motives are distasteful and his moral case against Freud and psychoanalysis is flawed. What then of the scientific case?
Soon after Analysis Terminable was published, Seymour Fisher and Roger Greenberg wrote in response to say, among other things, that “the family pattern basic to male homosexuality” had emerged with “fairly good scientific support.” Crews did not consider that specfic claim on its merits, but instead cast doubt on all of Fisher and Greenberg’s findings that supported Freud, because “some other extant hypothesis may do an even better job of accounting for the same consequence.”
This argument is fair enough in one sense: of course alternative hypotheses should be considered. However, the question then arises, what are those hypotheses? Do they exist? To insist there must always be more plausible non-Freudian explanations for any evidence that seems to support Freud is little more than an act of faith. One can argue as much as one wants to that Freudian explanations are inherently implausible, but failure to find better ones must count in their favour.
In the case of homosexuality, one might argue that it is the child’s homosexuality or gender non-conforming traits that cause the relationship with the parents rather than the other way around, but this supposes one accepts that people are ‘born gay’, a deeply controversial and questionable theory.
Most scientists involved in research into homosexuality would not claim that the ‘born gay’ theory has yet been proven, or that it is ever likely to be proven. There is a widespread admission that environmental factors are likely to play an important role. Even so, probably most of the researchers would not accept that psychoanalytic theories have anything to be said for them, but it is not clear that they are on strong ground in this.
‘The older brother effect is the only “environmental” factor that has found to be consistently related to sexual orientation…Other environmental influences previously hypothesized to be involved in sexual orientation development, based on psychoanalytic and learning theories have not been supported by research. “Overbearing mothers,” distant fathers, and sexual abuse have not been found to be related to sexual orientation.’
This is not what Simon LeVay says, however (http://members.aol.com/slevay/page22.html). According to LeVay, “Retrospective studies confirm that gay men tend to describe their relationships with their mothers as unusually close and with their fathers as distant or hostile (Bell et al., 1981, Freund & Blanchard, 1983.”
LeVay adds that this doesn’t necessarily mean that parental attitudes influence sexual orientation in the way Freud envisaged, but that leaves open the possibility that they might do just that. LeVay’s treatment of the psychoanalytic theories of homosexuality in Queer Science is relatively fair and balanced and lacks the stridently anti-Freudian tone of Hamer’s Science of Desire. Perhaps Hamer et al and LeVay should compare notes.
In any case, since the current state of research on homosexuality does not show that the Freudian approach is outside the bounds of possibility, and given that many people see an urgent need to find out whether it is correct or not, there is no justification for saying that there is no warrant for further enquiry.
That Freud proposed more than one possible cause of homosexuality is a problem in itself only if one insists that there can be only a single cause of homosexuality. I don’t see why that should be true.
‘Critics have pointed out that the third edition of DSM (1980), like its predecessors, reflects political as well as medical and scientific opinion. Quite true: when smoking replaces homosexuality as a mental aberration, more of the credit must go to caucuses than to new findings.’
Obviously this is a critique with how the DSM is overly influenced by politicking rather than by research. But not in the world of Richard Warnotck.
Once again Warntock’s logic is faulty. What Crews is saying is that socio-political factors influence the DSM, and is drawing attention to the fact that while previously social attitudes determined that homosexuality was designated a mental aberration, now smoking is so designated. In other words he is putting homosexuality and smoking on a par, in the sense (and in this sense only) that the decision to designate them mental aberrations rests on socio-political prejudice, not sound science.
Crews’s comment vis-á-vis homosexuality is somewhat analogous to the observation that psychoanalysts generally (I hope!) no longer contend, with Freud, that penis envy is at the root of most women’s desire for a professional career. To say that no new findings have been cited for the change of view is not to suggest that the original ‘diagnosis’ was correct. On the contrary, people who point this out are contending that it had no sound basis in the first place.
Warntock cites Fisher and Greenberg’s findings (actually they were reporting other people’s studies) on homosexuality. There is an obvious flaw to their conclusions. Even presuming the studies cited were well constructed, a correlation does not demonstrate causation. Patterns of parent-child behaviour may be a *consequence* of homosexual characteristics in the child, not the *cause*. (On Warnotck’s comments on this, see below.)
But, more generally, F&G’s summary of studies is deeply flawed. The authors made no attempt to distinguish poorly designed studies from well designed ones, even including unpublished studies. Critics of the studies have pointed out that in many of them psychodynamic notions are presupposed in the construction of the study. As Cioffi writes in a review of F&G’s work (THES, 12 August 1977), “one of the reasons for their failure to see the extent of the gap between the evidence they have assembled and the conclusions they derive from it is that they have adopted the ill-advised practice of using the same term in both its natural, literal and its Freudian sense”. Cioffi concludes that “what these studies really show is that there are psychologists who would sooner part with their own penises than with the concept of castration anxiety”. (Such studies have also been strongly criticized by Eysenck and Wilson, and by Edward Erwin.)
Warntock raises and counters the argument made in the first paragraph above by contending that to challenge the psychodynamic thesis one has to accept a genetic explanation for homosexuality, which he describes as “deeply… questionable”. If one is not looking for a single aetiological explanation, then it is Warntock’s contention that is questionable. Twin studies indicate an appreciable genetic factor in the occurrence of homosexuality. There is also ongoing research on the effects of abnormal levels of some prenatal hormones that are thought to produce an increased chance of homosexuality. (A Google search came up with what looks like a comprehensive discussion of various theories and studies (up to 1991) at
It seems evident that we are a long way from understanding the factors that lead to an individual being homosexual. But that doesn’t mean we should take seriously Freud’s explanations, such as outlined below.
Warnotck writes: “That Freud proposed more than one possible cause of homosexuality is a problem in itself only if one insists that there can be only a single cause of homosexuality. I don’t see why that should be true.”
This is to completely miss the point of what I wrote. I pointed out that Freud derived his several explanations on the basis of whatever topic he was currently engaged with, and drew attention to what I called the elastic versatility of his interpretative procedures, which are such that he can always come up with a psychodynamic explanation to cover virtually any situation. Let’s consider examples.
In “Group Psychology” Freud posits a young man who has been “unusually fixated upon his mother in the sense of the Oedipus complex”. After puberty “the time comes for exchanging his mother for some other sexual object. Things take a sudden turn; the young man does not abandon his mother, but identifies with her, he transforms himself into her, and now looks for objects which can replace his ego for him, and on which he can bestow such love and care as he has experienced from his mother.” (SE 18, p.108)
Instead of “Things take a sudden turn”, Freud might just as well have written “abracadabra” for all that this amounts to a genuine explanation.
Or how about this: A young boy sees his little sister’s genitals “and invariably [sic] says… “Her —–‘s still quite small. But when she gets bigger it’ll grow all right”, leading to the “idea of a woman with a penis… […] If this idea of a woman with a penis becomes ‘fixated’ in an individual when he is a child… making him as a man unable to do without a penis in his love object… then he is bound to become a homosexual.” (SE 9, p. 216)
With this kind of ‘reasoning’, and Freud’s remarkable imaginative creativity, one could come up with half-a-dozen such ‘explanations’ in various contexts. When people write in generalities, as Warntock does in relation to Freud’s theories of homosexuality, Freud’s position can be made to sound reasonable; but when one examines specific examples of his explanations their weakness, and not infrequently, absurdity becomes apparent. (To appreciate the degree of absurdity that Freud can stretch to, I recommend the Wolf Man case history explanation of the development of the patient’s infantile homosexual desires, deriving from his supposedly have seen his naked mother copulating. [SE 17, pp.100-101. See also my *Seductive Mirage*, pp.73-75])
On Frederick Crews’s homophobia as of 1980, Paul Power and Allen Esterson are in a state of denial. Crews would not be in a position to have any opinion about political influences on the DSM if he had no views on the conditions the DSM discusses. I think Crews’s views on homosexuality come through clearly enough.
Crews was certainly not placing homosexuality and smoking on a par, as Esterson claims. The basis for Crews’s complaint about political influences on the DSM was precisely that smoking had replaced homosexuality! This indicates approval for the previous state of affairs in which homosexuality was listed as a mental ‘aberration’ and smoking was not.
While Crews says that previous editions of the DSM had also been influenced by politics, this does not amount to saying that homosexuality should not have been listed as an aberration. Crews also says that the editions of DSM were influenced by medicine and science. Perhaps then the listing of homosexuality as an aberration was based on medicine and science, rather than politics?
Had Crews been concerned in 1980 that homosexuality had wrongly been listed as a mental aberration, he could have said so at the time, rather than waiting for more than a decade until making that claim became fashionable to the point of being obligatory.
I am not sure I should be responding to Allen Esterson’s post about the origins of homosexuality. Esterson thinks I have missed his point; I think he has missed my point.
Certainly there are likely to be biological influences on homosexuality. Few people deny this. Freud did not deny it. Yet most researchers, except for one or two who like making sensational claims and apparently have little concern about their own future reputations, don’t think that biological influences are all there are to the situation.
So one has to consider environmental influences as well, and how these might operate. This is something which is at the most rudimentary stage, and nothing anyone has come up with has displaced psychoanalysis. Esterson complains that the psychoanalytic approaches are guesswork. Obviously they are guesswork, but they could also be more or less accurate guesswork in some cases, for all that anyone knows.
Pouring scorn on them, because one thinks that they are disgusting or immoral or whatever, does not show that they are incorrect. If attempts to understand sexual orientation in biological terms alone keep failing, then scientists will either have to eventually either start taking psychoanalysis more seriously or give up (and one can’t turn to behaviourist theories of sexual orientation instead, because they are a dead donkey).
Since Richard Warnotck has not stood over the logic of his original assertion when applied in an uncongenial setting then why should the rest of us have to answer his claims about Crews?
At this point Warnotck is like his hero who imputed sexual fantasies in childhood to his victims, sorry I mean patients, and who then claimed they were engaged in repression when they disagreed with him. Warnotck imputes homophobia to the early Crews, then claims that the later Crews has changed his opinion to suit the times. Like his hero he then must twist everything to suit his misinterpretation lest his bad faith be exposed.
I will put this question to Warnotck:
if the captain of a country’s rugby team engages in a near-murderous spear tackle and is not condemned by his fellow countrymen, does this mean that they think spear-tackling is ok? A simple yes will suffice. If, against his own logic, the answer is no I would like an explanation as to why the absence of a condemnation of homophobia is agreement with it while the absence of condemnation of a spear tackle is not agreement with it.
Warntock is right. This really *is* getting ridiculous. I know Frederick Crews, and know that he doesn’t hold the “homophobic” views imputed to him by Warntock. And Crews did not need to spell out explicitly that he disapproved of DSM previously listing homosexuality as an aberration because it was common knowledge at the time he published *Skeptical Engagements* that he was a liberal who would not have approved of describing homosexuality as a mental aberration.
I challenged Warnotck’s defence of Freud’s bringing forward several different explanations for homosexuality, pointing out that my criticism was essentially that Freud’s mode of explanation was such that he could virtually *always* provide a purported explanation out of whatever material he was engaged with at the time. I then gave two examples of Freud’s explanations, to which Warnotck responds:
“Esterson complains that the psychoanalytic approaches are guesswork. Obviously they are guesswork, but they could also be more or less accurate guesswork in some cases, for all that anyone knows. Pouring scorn on them, because one thinks that they are disgusting or immoral or whatever, does not show that they are incorrect.”
I was, of course, saying a lot more than that the explanations in question were “guesswork”. (Freud would have been outraged to hear his psychoanalytic ‘findings’ so described!) I was challenging the very mode of explanation that Freud habitually employed. And, yes, I’m prepared to pour scorn on such explanations when I think they are unworthy to be taken seriously (not because they are “disgusting or immoral” – why Warnotck brought those adjectives into this particular exchange is a mystery).
That Warntock responds to my examples by saying that pouring scorn on them does not show they are incorrect suggests he thinks they are intellectually respectable explanations. I think that tells us something about the kinds of explanations Warntock is prepared to entertain seriously. Perhaps he could give his views on the following account of the processes involved in the Wolf Man’s supposed early childhood homosexual inclinations:
“He wished he could be back in the womb…in order that he might be copulated there by his father, might obtain sexual satisfaction from him, and might bear him a child. The wish to be born of his father…the wish to be sexually satisfied by him, the wish to present him with a child – and all this at the price of his own masculinity, and expressed in the language of anal erotism – these wishes complete the circle of his fixation upon his father. In them homosexuality has found its furthest and most intimate expression… […] “There is a wish to be inside the mother’s womb in order to replace her during intercourse… The phantasy of rebirth…is in all probability regularly a softened substituted for the phantasy of incestuous intercourse with the mother… There is a wish to be back in a situation in which one was in the mother’s genitals; and in this connection the man is identifying himself with his own penis and is using it to represent himself…” (SE 7, p.101)
Maybe Warntock calls this kind of stuff “guesswork”. I call it absurd, not worthy of serious consideration. But it can’t be regarded as an aberration – it comes directly out of the mode of explanation characteristic of Freud that provided his explanations for homosexuality that I previously cited.
Far from considering his explanations (in general) to be “guesswork”, Freud himself not infrequently claimed that they had been “confirmed”. For instance, in 1916 he wrote that the what he had inferred about early childhood sexuality from the psychoanalysis of adults “was later confirmed point by point by direct observation of children”. [At this point the editor cites the Little Hans case history.] (SE 16, p.310) This kind of spurious claim is what Cioffi has described as the strongest reason for describing Freud as a pseudoscientist. Incidentally, don’t take my word that the above claim of confirmation is spurious. In the Preface to the 1920 edition of “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” Freud wrote that “the beginnings of human sexual life which are here described can only be confirmed by investigators who have enough patience and technical skill to trace an analysis to the first years of a patient’s childhood… None, however, but physicians who practice psychoanalysis can have any access whatever to this sphere of knowledge…”
The quotation from the Wolf Man case history above exemplifies Freud’s idea of what can be ‘found’ by someone with an abundance of the “technical skill” necessary to trace an analysis to the first years of a patient’s childhood.
Of course, as Warntock writes, in regard to homosexuality one has to consider the possibility of environmental influences as well genetic and hormonal influence. But “environmental” (including the familial environment) does not necessarily mean “psychoanalytic”.
No doubt it would be in vain to ask how Allen Esterson knows that the sort of explanation Freud provides of homosexuality is implausible. Could it be the same method of knowledge that made it possible for Esterson to be sure that a daughter’s expression of love for her mother can never be disguised hate?
I would like to thank Warnotck for illustrating the point I have been making by drawing attention to one of the many ways that Freud’s highly imaginative interpretative procedures enable him to supposedly validate just about any ‘finding’ he arrives at. The reference he gives in my book relates to a section dealing with Freud’s general accounts of female psycho-sexual development. To make full sense of the item Warnotck cites it is necessary to briefly spell out the context of the passage in question.
Freud postulated that castration anxiety (“the severest trauma of [a man’s] life”), aroused by threats of castration but only taking effect after the little boy has seen the genitals of a young sister, results in the renunciation of a boy’s Oedipal desires towards his mother. Despite the fact that his patients had been predominantly female during the period in which he had formulated his infantile psycho-sexuality notions, “the information about infantile sexuality was obtained from the study of men and the theory deduced from it was concerned with male children” (1935 footnote, SE 20, p.36) Why thirty years of deep analytic probings into the unconscious of his female patients didn’t provide him with a corresponding theory of female infantile sexuality he never explained.
Briefly, around 1925 Freud set about providing an explanation for why (supposedly) an infant girl’s attachment to her mother (a phenomenon he has only just ‘discovered’!) is rejected by the child, and replaced by Oedipal desires for her father. No summary can do justice to the wonders of Freud’s accounts of female psycho-sexual development. For instance, when an infant girl catches sight of the male genitals: “She makes her decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it.” Freud conjures up several explanations for the supposed infant girls’ rejection of their mother in favour of their father, including that the mother failed to feed them sufficiently, shared her love with others, aroused their sexual activity and then forbade it, and that they have a fear of being murdered or poisoned by her. In the third of his accounts he tells us that these explanations (“which analysis brings to light”!) do not suffice to account for the rejection of the mother. He now reports the “specific factor” that does the trick: “It was, however, a surprise to learn from analyses that girls hold their mothers responsible for their lack of a penis and do not forgive her for their being at a disadvantage.” [See *Seductive Mirage*, pp. 140-151]
It is worth noting here a couple of Freud’s persuasive techniques. By saying this ‘finding’ is “a surprise” he implies it is a genuine discovery (rather than the figment of his imagination it actually is). And by writing that his contentions are the result of “analysis” (and even “established beyond doubt”!) he implies there is a solid basis for his ‘findings’, when it is evident that he has scoured his imagination for anything that comes to hand.
Now we come to the passage cited by Warnotck. Freud tells us that “The turning away from the mother [around age four] is accompanied by hostility; the attachment to the mother ends in hate. A hate of that kind may become very striking and last through life; it may be carefully overcompensated later on.” It is regard to this latter sentence that I noted that this illustrates a typical Freudian device: “Should one observe a close affection of a daughter for her mother, one should not be deceived. It may merely be a manifestation of overcompensated hate.” My point was, of course, that even if what Freud postulates is apparently not the case for specific individuals, it does not refute his thesis: Whichever way it turns out, Freud can show it is consistent with his contentions. *That* is the point I was making in the passage cited by Warntock, the one to which he makes an objection.
Warnotck wants to me to tell him on what grounds one decides that an explanation is implausible. There is, of course, no hard and fast principle, one has to make these judgements for oneself. Some seem to be pretty easy. The contention that it is a general feature of female psycho-sexual development that girls around the age of four experience a long-lasting hatred for their mother, and that this comes about because they fear they are being poisoned by her, and because they blame her for their lack of a penis, is one such case. Another example that I’ve already given (and which Warnotck evidently finds plausible) is the following train of events supposedly explaining homosexuality: A boy observes his young sister is lacking a penis and thinks that she will eventually grow one, leading to the idea of a “woman with a penis”, which idea becomes fixated so that in adulthood he “is unable to do without a penis in his love object”.
I can’t help feeling that the description “implausible” doesn’t do full justice to such explanations. As Ernest Gellner wrote in *The Psychoanalytic Movement* after quoting a passage from Freud: “If you are satisfied with this kind of explanation, you’ll be satisfied with anything.”
Allen Esterson describes Freud’s position as: “Should one observe a close affection of a daughter for her mother, one should not be deceived. It may merely be a manifestation of overcompensated hate.”
Note the importance of the word ‘may.’ Freud is raising the possibility that apparent love may be disguised hate in some cases, not insisting that this must always be true. The crucial ‘may’ leaves open the possibility that Freud’s claims about the development of the oedipus complex in girls might sometimes be mistaken.
In contrast, by calling Freud’s raising of the possibility that apparent love may sometimes be disguised hate a ‘sleight of hand’, Esterson is insisting that apparent love can never be disguised hate. No one can be sure how Esterson knows this, or how that claim could possibly be proved or disproved. Esterson’s standpoint is more dogmatic than Freud’s.
Warntock ignores the context in which the comment he cites was made. Freud has postulated that in the process of psycho-sexual development young girls, around age four, undergo a profound emotional change during which a close attachment to the mother is replaced by Oedipal desires for the father. In the course of this change the original love for the mother changes to hatred. To explain what sets in motion this preposterous scenario, Freud posits several absurd ‘reasons’ why the little girl turns away from her mother, the most important of which is that the mother didn’t provide her with a penis. He writes that the hatred experienced by the girl for her mother in this period may last all through life. It is at this point he produces his characteristic Freudian manoeuvre that allows him to contend that whatever the eventually, it is consistent with his thesis: If you perceive affection of an older girl or woman for her mother, it may be a form of disguised hatred.
Now after the string of absurdities doled out by Freud one would think the reader would recognise his last contention as an example of his refutation-evasion devices. Not Warnotck. At the end of this whole preposterous flight of fancy all he can do is suggest that there may be substance to Freud’s suggestion that affection may be overcompensated hate. Apparently he doesn’t see that the absurd context in which Freud comes up with his “overcompensated hate” remark makes it unworthy of consideration.
Warnotck writes that “Esterson is insisting that apparent love can never be disguised hate”. In fact I didn’t express an opinion on such an issue, my comment was purely about a refutation-evading device in a specific context. If I were to respond to his contention, to start with I would want to know what Warntock means by “apparent love”. But there’s no way I’m now going to get into a debate on this with someone who ignores the central point of virtually everything I write, and finds something extraneous on which he thinks he can gain a point.
One of the points Warntock has evaded is my question about whether he gives credence to the preposterous account of the homosexuality of the Wolf Man I described in an earlier post, or the “woman with a penis” explanation of homosexuality in some men. The implication of some of his comments is that he regards this and other examples I’ve supplied as credible explanations, thereby indicating he is in the company of those of whom one can say, with Gellner: “If you are satisfied with this kind of explanation, you’ll be satisfied with anything.” With such people there comes a time when one has to say enough is enough, I withdraw.
There was no need for Allen Esterson to go over Freud’s thinking on the development of the oedipus complex in girls again, thank you. Most readers probably have good enough memories that they don’t need it repeated.
Esterson is convinced it is preposterous and absurd, but what is more preposterous and absurd in my view is to express that opinion without being able to give any good reasons.
Most preposterous and absurd of all is to insist that what seems to be love (what else could “apparent love” mean, given the way English is normally used?) must be love and not hatred, for example. Unfortunately this is what Esterson insists on in page 146 of his book – at least as far as mothers and their daughters are concerned. I see no reason why only love between mothers and their daughters must be genuine, so forgive me for taking this as a general denial that what seems to be love can ever be anything else.
That is literally the worst argument anyone writing a book about Freud could make. Far from disproving the theory that Freud’s critics are motivated by emotion rather than reason, it supports it. To call raising an obvious possiblity about the nature of emotion a ‘sleight of hand’ is precisely an emotional and not a rational response. This is not an extraneous point, but a crucial, central issue.
Esterson also thinks Freud’s explanations of homosexuality are preposterous, but that, as they say, is just his opinion. Esterson is not a homosexual himself, I suppose (he is welcome to correct me if I am wrong). I would prefer to trust the judgment of someone who is both a homosexual and an intelligent writer.
Andrew Sullivan is both these things, and his discussion of the psychoanalytic theories of male homosexuality in Love Undetectable is superior to that of professional psychologist Malcolm Macmillan in Freud Evaluated. It will also be much more widely read and influential. Some anti-gay psychologists have noticed it, and quoted it in their books. I expect it will turn out to be a turning point in the debate.
Returning to Frederick Crew’s homophobia, let me point out the unfortunate consequences of Esterson’s reasoning. If Crews did not say that homosexuality was not a mental illness in 1980 because he did not have to, one has to conclude that Crews did say homosexuality was not a mental illness in 1993 because he did have to. I wonder why.
“If Crews did not say that homosexuality was not a mental illness in 1980 because he did not have to, one has to conclude that Crews did say homosexuality was not a mental illness in 1993 because he did have to” writes Richard Warnotck. What utter rubbish. How about taking into account the context of what is being written? As has been explained, nothing in any quote from Crews adduced by Warnotck allows one to deduce Crews’s attitute to homosexuality, whether pro or anti. In some cases Crews was writing about the bad effects of Freudianism, while in the DSM quote he was considering how much the contents of what should be a reliable scientific tool are dependent on politicking by cabals rather than on
research.
Is Warnotck trying to get the record for the highest number of illogical statements in a debate? He is nothing more than an intellectual spear-tackler.
I am writing as one of the co-authors of *Astrology, Science and Culture*, “reviewed” by Geoff Dean for this website. On p. 107, n. 7 therein, I mention that Dean, as a longstanding critic of astrology, has two principal rhetorical strategies: “One is to tendentiously ‘summarize’ his opponents’s arguments and then deal with the resulting creation. The other is to engage in apparently endless reply and counter-reply, while conceding nothing, to the point where his opponents sensibly decide that the process has become fruitless and decline to continue – whereupon Dean claims victory.”
The first strategy is what, yet again, he has done with our book, and I have no intention (having a life) of giving him the opportunity to engage in the second. So I will only comment that it is a shame that Dean continues to refuse to engage with – as opposed to merely attempting to destroy – any arguments which throw into question his own foundational assumptions. (Thinking is hard, but that’s no excuse.)
For the same reason, I would invite readers, if they are interested in the subject, to read the book for themselves and then make up their own minds.
“The graveyard of the gods isn’t yet full. But gone are the deities of the ancient Egyptians, Vikings, Aztecs, and the like, all of whom once played a role in filling the gaps in human understanding of how nature works.”
While the aformentioned gods aren’t seen as the powers behind natural events (by most)they are still followed. If Christians etc could do the same the world might be a safer place.
Re:Recent Communique From Animal Liberation Front
‘Associate with HLS and we will ruin your life.’
Has the U.S. Government considered using the Homeland Security Act against these whackos?
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen says Freud’s followers were opportunists. Perhaps he is right about this, but in the interests of fairness, let us recognize that it is not only psychoanalysts who are capable of behaving opportunistically. Consider for example the opportunism of his ally Frederick Crews over homosexuality.
Cast your mind back to 1980 and Frederick Crews’s essay Analysis Terminable. In a postscript to that article, Crews expressed his views on the harm psychoanalysis had caused American society as follows: ‘As a member of a society steeped in Freudian platitudes, I would like people to know that the guilt dispensed by psychoanalytic theorists to striving women and to the parents of homosexuals, “neurotics”, and psychotics can be plausibly declined.’ (Reprinted in Skeptical Engagements, p. 41).
Since placing “neurotics” in scare quotes implicitly denies that neurosis exists, Crews effectively places homosexuality on a level with the most severe kind of mental illness. He implies that if, say, a mother somehow caused her child to become a homosexual, then she should be as ashamed as if she had caused her child to become a psychotic.
Now fast forward to 1993 and the memory wars. Crews had this to say about the harms caused by psychoanalysis:
‘Parents have agonized about having caused their children’s homosexuality, and gays have been told that their sexual preference is a mental disorder.’ (The Memory Wars, p. 71).
That is a highly confused and extremely ugly statement, for two main reasons:
1. Crews implies, hopefully without really realizing what he is saying, that parents do not care whether homosexuality is a mental illness or not just so long as they are not responsible for it. Had Crews wanted to avoid giving that impression, he should have said that BOTH gays AND their parents have been told that homosexuality is a mental illness (and as a literary critic, I don’t think Crews can object to close reading of his own rhetoric).
2. Crews places the blame for the idea that homosexuality is a mental illness on psychoanalysis. He ignores his own past assertions in Commentary, which show that one certainly does not have to be a Freudian to equate homosexuality with mental illness. Crews should in any case know perfectly well that the idea that homosexuality was a mental illness was one not held by Freud himself.
Now, as most for us know, concern for homosexuals had become fashionable by the 1990s, whereas it was not so fashionable in the early 1980s. For Crews to suddenly manifest such concern for homosexuals in the 1990s, whereas he had previously lumped them with psychotics, is therefore a brazen and deeply disgusting piece of opportunism.
Should there ever be a shift back in the direction of sexual conservatism, which I suspect is quite likely, then the way Crews updated his anti-Freudian rhetoric to make it more acceptable to a PC age will be used to show that liberals were always hypocrites.
A response to Warnotck’s remarks on Frederick Crews:
I suspect Crews put “neurotics” in inverted commas because in popular usage it is so ill-defined. Insofar as it has a more precise meaning it is in contradistinction to “psychosis”, i.e., it covers mental disorders such as forms of depression and severe anxiety states, of which of course Crews does not deny the existence. But in everyday life (and in literature) it is used more broadly and in a fashion that almost defies definition, hence the inverted commas.
Only in Warnotck’s mind could the sentence in question imply that Crews places homosexuality on the same level with psychoses. Crews is simply pointing out that in dispositions as diverse as that of homosexuality and some mental disorders psychoanalysts have historically posited that they are the result of parental behaviours in relation to their children.
Concerning the numbered points:
1. Warnotck gives a tendentious reading of the sentence in question which is idiosyncratic and unwarranted.
2. That other ‘authorities’ have labelled homosexuality a mental disorder does not refute Crews’s assertion that in the past orthodox psychoanalysts have contended that homosexuality is caused by early childhood experiences and that it can be ‘cured’. In the United States in particular, it was the immense prestige enjoyed by the psychoanalytic community that made the contention in question plausible for many people.
Incidentally, Freud may not have described homosexuality as a mental illness, but he certainly described it as a “sexual aberration” and homosexuals as “inverts”.
The last two paragraphs of Warnotck’s posting bear so little relation to Crews’s views that they scarcely warrant a rebuttal.
Only someone determined to construe Crews’ comments in a bad light could interpret them in the terms Warnotck insists on. His misconstruing of them makes what he writes in his latest posting completely off target (and the first sentence gratuitously offensive towards Crews as well as being misconceived).
Perhaps it’s worth noting here the succinct response of Sean Purcell to one of Warnotck’s postings in the previous exchanges on Freud and psychoanalysis: “Guy’s mad.” While I’m sure Sean didn’t intend this to be taken too literally, the level at which Warnotck pitches his latest contribution, and particularly the last paragraph and the absurd misrepresentation of Crews’s position in the last two paragraphs of his previous posting to which he is alluding therein, indicates the futility of engaging in debates with him.
Allen Esterson would have us believe that Frederick Crews’s repellent comments do not mean what they seem to mean taken at face value. Can he not see the irony of this? Anti-Freudians have long warned us against seeing hidden meanings in everything, so they are in no position to complain if someone decides that their major spokesman meant exactly what he wrote.
Given the vehement and emotional nature of Crews’s claims about the harm wrecked by psychoanalysis, it will not do to say that he was simply noting that homosexuality and psychosis were both held to be caused by parental behaviour. The only reason why their causation should matter is if homosexuality and psychosis are both bad things. For Crews to mention them together implies that he considers them equally bad.
To say that only I could think that is an ad hominem argument which does not address the issue. I am not the only person in this world who does not like Crews. If Esterson tries asking some of the others what they thought Crews meant, I suspect many or most of them will agree with me about this.
Regarding my other points, could Esterson please say why he thinks my understanding of what Crews wrote in the Memory Wars is “idiosyncratic and unwarranted”? “Because Frederick Crews is such a nice person”, is not a good enough answer. I do think that literary critics should pay attention to language and nuances of meaning.
The last two paragraphs of my posting have everything to do with Crews’s views, in my opinion. They also concern important social issues which in one way or another affect everyone. Esterson can ignore them now if he wishes, but sooner or later they will have to be dealt with.
I would like to record my agreement with Allen Esterson. Richard Warnotck’s interpretation of Crews’s remarks is laughably twisted.
Here is what Crews originally wrote:
“I would like people to know that the guilt dispensed by psychoanalytic theorists to striving women and to the parents of homosexuals, “neurotics”, and psychotics can be plausibly declined.”.
Now it should be obvious to anyone that Crews is attacking Freudianism for creating unnecessary feelings of guilt. That is the sole intent of the comments quoted. Crews is not engaged in passing judgment on anything else, so he does not comment on why a parent being told he/she caused an offspring’s homosexuality would be thereby upset. His sole interest is in the truth content of Freudianism.
From this quote, Warnotck immediately infers that Crews has a problem with homosexuals. Did Crews write something of the sort that Pat Robertson and his ilk come out with? No. It’s all Warnotck’s inference.
Let’s play Warnotck’s game on Warnotck himself. Note once again Crews’s original quote: “I would like people to know that the guilt dispensed by psychoanalytic theorists to striving women and to the parents of homosexuals, “neurotics”, and psychotics can be plausibly declined.”
Did you notice the “striving women”? Warnotck does not mention them at all. So we can infer that he has no problem with the guilt caused in such women by Freudianism.
And should Warnotck now reply that he has no such opinions, he will be guilty, in his own words, of “opportunism”.
I am accused of being offensive to Frederick Crews. With respect, I do not think that someone so given to inflammatory rhetoric and overstatement as Crews deserves to be treated with kid gloves. To make vehement criticisms of psychoanalysis is to invite a vehement response.
I’m sure I have nothing more to say about Crews’s comments on homosexuality. I believe I have proved my point.
The only conclusion possible is that Richard Warnotck is deluded and likes it that way.
Frank Cioffi says,
“Theories are not like Mt. Everest. We don’t undertake the arduous task of assessing them merely because they are there. We want reasons for thinking they might be true.”
I believe I have an answer to this. Whether or not one personally considers that a theory could be true should not be the question. The fact is that some Freudian theories are or have been widely believed and this has important consequences. We need to know whether they are correct or not. Suggesting they may be worthless, without trying to test them, will not solve the problem.
You know, I had been prepared to give this up and go away. I really had. I can get tired of this sort of thing, just as anyone else can. Not responding to me would probably be a good way of getting rid of me. Yet, since Paul Power declares me deluded, I will respond.
What does Power think I am deluded about? About the fact that Frederick Crews has engaged in much inflammatory rhetoric and overstatement over the years? Is Crews then the very embodiment of moderation, politeness, and restraint? Surely not.
Neither is it a delusion to think that angry criticisms often prompt angry responses, or that angry responses are often deserved in such cases. If critics want to let loose passionate emotion in their criticisms, then equally passionate comments on those emotions are the thing needed in response.
So I have no apology there. ‘Analysis Terminable’ is a violent piece of rhetoric. It is Crews’s primal scream. It is deeply offensive to many different categories of people. Presumably there were some personal issues behind it, Crews had some things he needed to get off his chest, etc.
The most objectionable thing about it is the undertone of contempt for the people Crews claims to be concerned about. Those ‘striving women’, for example.
Why did Crews think that ‘striving women’ need him to be feminist? ‘Striving women’ can take care of themselves very well, I think. They don’t need Crews to rescue them from the wicked Freudians, ready to make them feel guilty by talking about penis envy. ‘Striving women’, by definition, are strong and capable. Yet Crews really seems to think that, without a brave, strong man like him to help them, they would be overwhelmed by guilt, their ‘strivings’ not much use. This attitude is actually sexism, not feminism.
Eh, Richard: You’re at it again. Making huge unfounded leaps of inference without any basis in anything except your own absurd twisted misreadings, which I am coming to the
conclusion are deliberate because you have nothing else.
Paul Power says I am misreading Frederick Crews. Power, for his part, is not reading Crews at all. He does not discuss the details of what Crews wrote or ask precisely what it means. I am assuming that Crews meant precisely what he wrote and nothing more.
Here is what Crews originally wrote:
“I would like people to know that the guilt dispensed by psychoanalytic theorists to striving women and to the parents of homosexuals, “neurotics”, and psychotics can be plausibly declined.”
From this Richard Warnotck claim that Crews has a problem with homosexuals and that Warnotck assumes “that Crews meant precisely what he wrote and nothing more”.
Let’s look at that Crews sentence:
1) I would like people to know that
2) the guilt dispensed by psychoanalytic theorists
3) to striving women and to the parents of homosexuals, “neurotics”, and psychotics
4) can be plausibly declined
It should be obvious that this sentence is Crews bringing the good news that the guilt Freudianism caused in the people listed in 3) is unnecessary (because Freudianism is a lie). And that’s all. The rest is all in Richard Warnotck’s mind.
And I just love this: “You know, I had been prepared to give this up and go away”. Really, it’s too too much, coming from the person whose absurd misreadings started this debate.
And BTW Richard: as I pointed out earlier, you are hoist by your own petard. Using your own logic you have contempt for “striving women”. Claiming that Crews patronises them is no defence. How about answering that?
It has occurred to me that Richard Warnotck is committing a variation on a fallacy ably explained on ths website by Julian Baggini, at http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/badmovesprint.php?num=52. Although the fallacy is given as “Partial defence = support”, Baggini deals only with one type of example, where a defence of one policy of a political party is mistaken for support of all that party’s policies.
To see why Warnotck’s is another variation on this fallacy, take a sentence in the same form as Crews’s first comment: “I am happy that with the fall of Berlin in 1945, the Nazi death threat was no longer hanging over Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, Slavs and those sentenced to execution for killing while drunk-driving”. The Warnotck variation is to assume that the author of this remark, in his partial defence of drunk-driving killers (implying they should not be executed for their crime) , is also saying that there is nothing wrong with killing while drunk driving.
While is is certainly possible that an instance of partial defence is the expression of total support, there is no logical imperative at work so this general argument remains a fallacy
Had Frederick Crews really wanted to relieve the guilt of parents with homosexual children there would have been a simple way of doing it: explain that homosexuality is OK and that it doesn’t matter what causes it.
For Crews to deny that parents should feel guilt ‘because Freudianism is a lie’, as Paul Power puts it, only makes sense if one accepts that homosexuality is a bad thing and that parents would rightly feel guilty if they were responsible. (Incidentally, honest scientists admit that the origins of sexual orientation are still an open question and that some role for environmental and family influences cannot be ruled out).
‘Can be plausibly declined’ was a very odd choice of words in this context. If I were a guilt-wracked parent, I wouldn’t want to be told that the idea that I wasn’t responsible for the homosexuality of my children was just ‘plausible.’ I’d want to be absolutely sure I wasn’t responsible. To say that the guilt can be ‘plausibly declined’ leaves open the possibility that I might be responsible after all. This is another sign that Crews lacked any genuine compassion for parents and was only exploiting the issue of homosexuality for his anti-Freudian crusade.
Had Crews wished to express hatred for homosexuals, there would have been a simple way of doing it: explain that homosexuality is not OK .
“For Crews to deny that parents should feel guilt ‘because Freudianism is a lie’, as Paul Power puts it, only makes sense if one accepts that homosexuality is a bad thing and that parents would rightly feel guilty if they were responsible”. And therefore to express relief that those who killed while drunk driving did not have to face execution by the Nazis only makes sense if one accepts that killing while drunk-driving is not a bad thing?
Paul Power’s logic seems to be that if someone does not say something in as many words, rather than using language that it implies it, that cannot be what they really meant. In using this logic, Power effectively admits that Crews was not trying to relieve the guilt of parents with homosexual children. Thank you for at least admitting that much.
Richard Warnotck just cannot kick his dirty little habit of misinterpreting. As I tried to explain, an attack on an attack on X does not imply support for X.
At this point I would like him to tell me why expressing relief that those who killed while drunk driving did not have to face execution by the Nazis only makes sense if one accepts that killing while drunk-driving is not a bad thing?
“An attack on an attack on X does not imply support for X” ? How does this apply here?
What is ‘X’? Is ‘X’ homosexuality? No, I suppose it must be anti-homosexual views.
So let’s see. Does an attack on an attack on anti-homosexual views imply support for anti-homosexual views? Yeah, I think it does. In practice, that is what it implies.
I’m not going to discuss Nazis and drunk driving with Paul Power, because this isn’t the subject that needs considering here.
Re: Franks Cioffi’s ‘Was Freud a Pseudo-scientist?’
Yep. Which is why I think Paul and Richard shouldn’t be dignifying him with all this attention….
In response to Dee Nic Aibhne, I should point out that my recent posts have been about Frederick Crews, not about Sigmund Freud. If I am guilty of anything, then, it is giving Crews more attention than he is worth.
Perhaps more relevantly, Frank Cioffi’s arguments about pseudo-science don’t actually show that Freud was wrong about, say, the cause or causes of homosexuality.
One cannot simply declare that Freud was a pseudo-scientist, so therefore he must have been wrong about homosexuality. There has to be empirical investigation into homosexuality to answer that.
Richard Warntock writes in relation to the Frank Cioffi piece on B&W:
“One cannot simply declare that Freud was a pseudo-scientist, so therefore he must have been wrong about homosexuality. There has to be empirical investigation into homosexuality to answer that.”
Now of course Cioffi doesn’t simply “declare” that Freud was a pseudo-scientist, he bases his views on many decades of close reading of Freud’s theses. Examples of the results of this study can be found throughout his book *Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience* (1998). Nor does he argue that because Freud was a pseudoscientist he must have been wrong about everything. In principle each claim has to as to be taken on its merits. In practice one has to take into account that they overwhelmingly depend on psychoanalytic inferences based on Freud’s idiosyncratic interpretative procedures and his ideas about the nature of the “Unconscious” as he conceived it. After one has examined numerous examples of the evidence Freud provides for his claims and found them wanting, it is justifiable to decide that other claims based on similar modes of evidential contentions do not warrant serious consideration.
On the specific issue of homosexuality, Warnotck writes that “Frank Cioffi’s arguments about pseudo-science don’t actually show that Freud was wrong about, say, the cause or causes of homosexuality… There has to be empirical investigation into homosexuality to answer that.”
Few would dispute this last contention. However Freud is one exception. He wrote that he “could not put much value on [experimental studies] because the abundance of reliable observations on which [psychoanalytic] propositions rest make them independent of experimental verification.” By “reliable observations” he meant the kind of inferential psychoanalytic findings obtained in the course of the psychoanalyses of patients, and of his imaginative cogitations. This kind of approach led to his providing several *different* explanations for homosexuality, derived on the basis of whatever topic he was engaged on at the time. [A. Esterson, *Seductive Mirage*, p. 192] (For instance, when he was dealing with “Little Hans”, he came up with an explanation invoking the castration complex.) The elastic versatility of his interpretive procedures meant that his findings included that he “had never yet come through a single psychoanalysis of a man or woman without having to take into account a very considerable current of homosexuality.” When one investigates specific examples of how he arrived at such a conclusion (e.g., in the Wolf Man case history) one understands why Cioffi questions “whether the grounds advanced for crediting Freudian theory are good enough to warrant further enquiry”.
Richard Warnotck asks what I mean by X. In this context X are parents of homosexuals who believe that homosexuality is wrong. The attack on them is Freudianism’s lie that they caused their offspring’s homosexuality.
The attack on this attack is Crews’s exposure of the lie. Warnotck is no more justified in his claim about Crews than I am in inferring that Warnotck thinks it ok to lie to people to make them suffer for beliefs he finds objectionable.
“Does an attack on an attack on anti-homosexual views imply support for anti-homosexual views?” No it does not. If the attack on anti-homsexual views was based on bad logic or racism or some similar form of intolerance, then pointing out these flaws would be good work regardless of one’s views on homosexuality.
Warnotck also does well to avoid my challenge involving Nazi executions of drunk-driving killers because it shows the emptiness of his argument. My challenge asks him to stand by his argument in an uncongenial context so he has to avoid it at all costs. Logically there is no difference between his argument that Crews is anti-homosexual and the claim that to oppose the execution of killer drunk-drivers is the same as thinking such killing is acceptable. His evasion suggests strongly that he is a knave rather than a fool.
If anyone still doubts that Frederick Crews held anti-gay views as late as 1980, there is another statement in Analysis Terminable that I should draw attention to:
‘Critics have pointed out that the third edition of DSM (1980), like its predecessors, reflects political as well as medical and scientific opinion. Quite true: when smoking replaces homosexuality as a mental aberration, more of the credit must go to caucuses than to new findings.’ (Skeptical Engagements, p. 36).
Only someone convinced both that smoking is not a ‘mental aberration’ and that homosexuality is one would say that. It makes no sense otherwise. Compare what Analysis Terminable says about homosexuality to what the Memory Wars says about it, and you will see that Crews reversed himself on the issue. He attacked Freud from an anti-gay position in 1980, then changed tactics and attacked Freud from a pro-gay position in the 1990s.
Crews’s motives are distasteful and his moral case against Freud and psychoanalysis is flawed. What then of the scientific case?
Soon after Analysis Terminable was published, Seymour Fisher and Roger Greenberg wrote in response to say, among other things, that “the family pattern basic to male homosexuality” had emerged with “fairly good scientific support.” Crews did not consider that specfic claim on its merits, but instead cast doubt on all of Fisher and Greenberg’s findings that supported Freud, because “some other extant hypothesis may do an even better job of accounting for the same consequence.”
This argument is fair enough in one sense: of course alternative hypotheses should be considered. However, the question then arises, what are those hypotheses? Do they exist? To insist there must always be more plausible non-Freudian explanations for any evidence that seems to support Freud is little more than an act of faith. One can argue as much as one wants to that Freudian explanations are inherently implausible, but failure to find better ones must count in their favour.
In the case of homosexuality, one might argue that it is the child’s homosexuality or gender non-conforming traits that cause the relationship with the parents rather than the other way around, but this supposes one accepts that people are ‘born gay’, a deeply controversial and questionable theory.
Most scientists involved in research into homosexuality would not claim that the ‘born gay’ theory has yet been proven, or that it is ever likely to be proven. There is a widespread admission that environmental factors are likely to play an important role. Even so, probably most of the researchers would not accept that psychoanalytic theories have anything to be said for them, but it is not clear that they are on strong ground in this.
Dean Hamer et al (http://mypage.iu.edu/˜bmustans/Summary.htm) state flatly that:
‘The older brother effect is the only “environmental” factor that has found to be consistently related to sexual orientation…Other environmental influences previously hypothesized to be involved in sexual orientation development, based on psychoanalytic and learning theories have not been supported by research. “Overbearing mothers,” distant fathers, and sexual abuse have not been found to be related to sexual orientation.’
This is not what Simon LeVay says, however (http://members.aol.com/slevay/page22.html). According to LeVay, “Retrospective studies confirm that gay men tend to describe their relationships with their mothers as unusually close and with their fathers as distant or hostile (Bell et al., 1981, Freund & Blanchard, 1983.”
LeVay adds that this doesn’t necessarily mean that parental attitudes influence sexual orientation in the way Freud envisaged, but that leaves open the possibility that they might do just that. LeVay’s treatment of the psychoanalytic theories of homosexuality in Queer Science is relatively fair and balanced and lacks the stridently anti-Freudian tone of Hamer’s Science of Desire. Perhaps Hamer et al and LeVay should compare notes.
In any case, since the current state of research on homosexuality does not show that the Freudian approach is outside the bounds of possibility, and given that many people see an urgent need to find out whether it is correct or not, there is no justification for saying that there is no warrant for further enquiry.
That Freud proposed more than one possible cause of homosexuality is a problem in itself only if one insists that there can be only a single cause of homosexuality. I don’t see why that should be true.
He just won’t stop.
Consider the latest Crews quote:
‘Critics have pointed out that the third edition of DSM (1980), like its predecessors, reflects political as well as medical and scientific opinion. Quite true: when smoking replaces homosexuality as a mental aberration, more of the credit must go to caucuses than to new findings.’
Obviously this is a critique with how the DSM is overly influenced by politicking rather than by research. But not in the world of Richard Warnotck.
Following on Paul Power’s response:
Once again Warntock’s logic is faulty. What Crews is saying is that socio-political factors influence the DSM, and is drawing attention to the fact that while previously social attitudes determined that homosexuality was designated a mental aberration, now smoking is so designated. In other words he is putting homosexuality and smoking on a par, in the sense (and in this sense only) that the decision to designate them mental aberrations rests on socio-political prejudice, not sound science.
Crews’s comment vis-á-vis homosexuality is somewhat analogous to the observation that psychoanalysts generally (I hope!) no longer contend, with Freud, that penis envy is at the root of most women’s desire for a professional career. To say that no new findings have been cited for the change of view is not to suggest that the original ‘diagnosis’ was correct. On the contrary, people who point this out are contending that it had no sound basis in the first place.
Warntock cites Fisher and Greenberg’s findings (actually they were reporting other people’s studies) on homosexuality. There is an obvious flaw to their conclusions. Even presuming the studies cited were well constructed, a correlation does not demonstrate causation. Patterns of parent-child behaviour may be a *consequence* of homosexual characteristics in the child, not the *cause*. (On Warnotck’s comments on this, see below.)
But, more generally, F&G’s summary of studies is deeply flawed. The authors made no attempt to distinguish poorly designed studies from well designed ones, even including unpublished studies. Critics of the studies have pointed out that in many of them psychodynamic notions are presupposed in the construction of the study. As Cioffi writes in a review of F&G’s work (THES, 12 August 1977), “one of the reasons for their failure to see the extent of the gap between the evidence they have assembled and the conclusions they derive from it is that they have adopted the ill-advised practice of using the same term in both its natural, literal and its Freudian sense”. Cioffi concludes that “what these studies really show is that there are psychologists who would sooner part with their own penises than with the concept of castration anxiety”. (Such studies have also been strongly criticized by Eysenck and Wilson, and by Edward Erwin.)
Warntock raises and counters the argument made in the first paragraph above by contending that to challenge the psychodynamic thesis one has to accept a genetic explanation for homosexuality, which he describes as “deeply… questionable”. If one is not looking for a single aetiological explanation, then it is Warntock’s contention that is questionable. Twin studies indicate an appreciable genetic factor in the occurrence of homosexuality. There is also ongoing research on the effects of abnormal levels of some prenatal hormones that are thought to produce an increased chance of homosexuality. (A Google search came up with what looks like a comprehensive discussion of various theories and studies (up to 1991) at
http://www.tim-taylor.com/papers/twin_studies/index.html
It seems evident that we are a long way from understanding the factors that lead to an individual being homosexual. But that doesn’t mean we should take seriously Freud’s explanations, such as outlined below.
Warnotck writes: “That Freud proposed more than one possible cause of homosexuality is a problem in itself only if one insists that there can be only a single cause of homosexuality. I don’t see why that should be true.”
This is to completely miss the point of what I wrote. I pointed out that Freud derived his several explanations on the basis of whatever topic he was currently engaged with, and drew attention to what I called the elastic versatility of his interpretative procedures, which are such that he can always come up with a psychodynamic explanation to cover virtually any situation. Let’s consider examples.
In “Group Psychology” Freud posits a young man who has been “unusually fixated upon his mother in the sense of the Oedipus complex”. After puberty “the time comes for exchanging his mother for some other sexual object. Things take a sudden turn; the young man does not abandon his mother, but identifies with her, he transforms himself into her, and now looks for objects which can replace his ego for him, and on which he can bestow such love and care as he has experienced from his mother.” (SE 18, p.108)
Instead of “Things take a sudden turn”, Freud might just as well have written “abracadabra” for all that this amounts to a genuine explanation.
Or how about this: A young boy sees his little sister’s genitals “and invariably [sic] says… “Her —–‘s still quite small. But when she gets bigger it’ll grow all right”, leading to the “idea of a woman with a penis… […] If this idea of a woman with a penis becomes ‘fixated’ in an individual when he is a child… making him as a man unable to do without a penis in his love object… then he is bound to become a homosexual.” (SE 9, p. 216)
With this kind of ‘reasoning’, and Freud’s remarkable imaginative creativity, one could come up with half-a-dozen such ‘explanations’ in various contexts. When people write in generalities, as Warntock does in relation to Freud’s theories of homosexuality, Freud’s position can be made to sound reasonable; but when one examines specific examples of his explanations their weakness, and not infrequently, absurdity becomes apparent. (To appreciate the degree of absurdity that Freud can stretch to, I recommend the Wolf Man case history explanation of the development of the patient’s infantile homosexual desires, deriving from his supposedly have seen his naked mother copulating. [SE 17, pp.100-101. See also my *Seductive Mirage*, pp.73-75])
Apologies to Richard Warnotck for misspelling his name!
This really is getting ridiculous.
On Frederick Crews’s homophobia as of 1980, Paul Power and Allen Esterson are in a state of denial. Crews would not be in a position to have any opinion about political influences on the DSM if he had no views on the conditions the DSM discusses. I think Crews’s views on homosexuality come through clearly enough.
Crews was certainly not placing homosexuality and smoking on a par, as Esterson claims. The basis for Crews’s complaint about political influences on the DSM was precisely that smoking had replaced homosexuality! This indicates approval for the previous state of affairs in which homosexuality was listed as a mental ‘aberration’ and smoking was not.
While Crews says that previous editions of the DSM had also been influenced by politics, this does not amount to saying that homosexuality should not have been listed as an aberration. Crews also says that the editions of DSM were influenced by medicine and science. Perhaps then the listing of homosexuality as an aberration was based on medicine and science, rather than politics?
Had Crews been concerned in 1980 that homosexuality had wrongly been listed as a mental aberration, he could have said so at the time, rather than waiting for more than a decade until making that claim became fashionable to the point of being obligatory.
I am not sure I should be responding to Allen Esterson’s post about the origins of homosexuality. Esterson thinks I have missed his point; I think he has missed my point.
Certainly there are likely to be biological influences on homosexuality. Few people deny this. Freud did not deny it. Yet most researchers, except for one or two who like making sensational claims and apparently have little concern about their own future reputations, don’t think that biological influences are all there are to the situation.
So one has to consider environmental influences as well, and how these might operate. This is something which is at the most rudimentary stage, and nothing anyone has come up with has displaced psychoanalysis. Esterson complains that the psychoanalytic approaches are guesswork. Obviously they are guesswork, but they could also be more or less accurate guesswork in some cases, for all that anyone knows.
Pouring scorn on them, because one thinks that they are disgusting or immoral or whatever, does not show that they are incorrect. If attempts to understand sexual orientation in biological terms alone keep failing, then scientists will either have to eventually either start taking psychoanalysis more seriously or give up (and one can’t turn to behaviourist theories of sexual orientation instead, because they are a dead donkey).
Since Richard Warnotck has not stood over the logic of his original assertion when applied in an uncongenial setting then why should the rest of us have to answer his claims about Crews?
At this point Warnotck is like his hero who imputed sexual fantasies in childhood to his victims, sorry I mean patients, and who then claimed they were engaged in repression when they disagreed with him. Warnotck imputes homophobia to the early Crews, then claims that the later Crews has changed his opinion to suit the times. Like his hero he then must twist everything to suit his misinterpretation lest his bad faith be exposed.
I will put this question to Warnotck:
if the captain of a country’s rugby team engages in a near-murderous spear tackle and is not condemned by his fellow countrymen, does this mean that they think spear-tackling is ok? A simple yes will suffice. If, against his own logic, the answer is no I would like an explanation as to why the absence of a condemnation of homophobia is agreement with it while the absence of condemnation of a spear tackle is not agreement with it.
Warntock is right. This really *is* getting ridiculous. I know Frederick Crews, and know that he doesn’t hold the “homophobic” views imputed to him by Warntock. And Crews did not need to spell out explicitly that he disapproved of DSM previously listing homosexuality as an aberration because it was common knowledge at the time he published *Skeptical Engagements* that he was a liberal who would not have approved of describing homosexuality as a mental aberration.
I challenged Warnotck’s defence of Freud’s bringing forward several different explanations for homosexuality, pointing out that my criticism was essentially that Freud’s mode of explanation was such that he could virtually *always* provide a purported explanation out of whatever material he was engaged with at the time. I then gave two examples of Freud’s explanations, to which Warnotck responds:
“Esterson complains that the psychoanalytic approaches are guesswork. Obviously they are guesswork, but they could also be more or less accurate guesswork in some cases, for all that anyone knows. Pouring scorn on them, because one thinks that they are disgusting or immoral or whatever, does not show that they are incorrect.”
I was, of course, saying a lot more than that the explanations in question were “guesswork”. (Freud would have been outraged to hear his psychoanalytic ‘findings’ so described!) I was challenging the very mode of explanation that Freud habitually employed. And, yes, I’m prepared to pour scorn on such explanations when I think they are unworthy to be taken seriously (not because they are “disgusting or immoral” – why Warnotck brought those adjectives into this particular exchange is a mystery).
That Warntock responds to my examples by saying that pouring scorn on them does not show they are incorrect suggests he thinks they are intellectually respectable explanations. I think that tells us something about the kinds of explanations Warntock is prepared to entertain seriously. Perhaps he could give his views on the following account of the processes involved in the Wolf Man’s supposed early childhood homosexual inclinations:
“He wished he could be back in the womb…in order that he might be copulated there by his father, might obtain sexual satisfaction from him, and might bear him a child. The wish to be born of his father…the wish to be sexually satisfied by him, the wish to present him with a child – and all this at the price of his own masculinity, and expressed in the language of anal erotism – these wishes complete the circle of his fixation upon his father. In them homosexuality has found its furthest and most intimate expression… […] “There is a wish to be inside the mother’s womb in order to replace her during intercourse… The phantasy of rebirth…is in all probability regularly a softened substituted for the phantasy of incestuous intercourse with the mother… There is a wish to be back in a situation in which one was in the mother’s genitals; and in this connection the man is identifying himself with his own penis and is using it to represent himself…” (SE 7, p.101)
Maybe Warntock calls this kind of stuff “guesswork”. I call it absurd, not worthy of serious consideration. But it can’t be regarded as an aberration – it comes directly out of the mode of explanation characteristic of Freud that provided his explanations for homosexuality that I previously cited.
Far from considering his explanations (in general) to be “guesswork”, Freud himself not infrequently claimed that they had been “confirmed”. For instance, in 1916 he wrote that the what he had inferred about early childhood sexuality from the psychoanalysis of adults “was later confirmed point by point by direct observation of children”. [At this point the editor cites the Little Hans case history.] (SE 16, p.310) This kind of spurious claim is what Cioffi has described as the strongest reason for describing Freud as a pseudoscientist. Incidentally, don’t take my word that the above claim of confirmation is spurious. In the Preface to the 1920 edition of “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” Freud wrote that “the beginnings of human sexual life which are here described can only be confirmed by investigators who have enough patience and technical skill to trace an analysis to the first years of a patient’s childhood… None, however, but physicians who practice psychoanalysis can have any access whatever to this sphere of knowledge…”
The quotation from the Wolf Man case history above exemplifies Freud’s idea of what can be ‘found’ by someone with an abundance of the “technical skill” necessary to trace an analysis to the first years of a patient’s childhood.
Of course, as Warntock writes, in regard to homosexuality one has to consider the possibility of environmental influences as well genetic and hormonal influence. But “environmental” (including the familial environment) does not necessarily mean “psychoanalytic”.
Correction: The Wolf Man reference in my previous posting in response to Warnotck should have been (SE 17, p.101)
No doubt it would be in vain to ask how Allen Esterson knows that the sort of explanation Freud provides of homosexuality is implausible. Could it be the same method of knowledge that made it possible for Esterson to be sure that a daughter’s expression of love for her mother can never be disguised hate?
(Seductive Mirage, p. 146).
I would like to thank Warnotck for illustrating the point I have been making by drawing attention to one of the many ways that Freud’s highly imaginative interpretative procedures enable him to supposedly validate just about any ‘finding’ he arrives at. The reference he gives in my book relates to a section dealing with Freud’s general accounts of female psycho-sexual development. To make full sense of the item Warnotck cites it is necessary to briefly spell out the context of the passage in question.
Freud postulated that castration anxiety (“the severest trauma of [a man’s] life”), aroused by threats of castration but only taking effect after the little boy has seen the genitals of a young sister, results in the renunciation of a boy’s Oedipal desires towards his mother. Despite the fact that his patients had been predominantly female during the period in which he had formulated his infantile psycho-sexuality notions, “the information about infantile sexuality was obtained from the study of men and the theory deduced from it was concerned with male children” (1935 footnote, SE 20, p.36) Why thirty years of deep analytic probings into the unconscious of his female patients didn’t provide him with a corresponding theory of female infantile sexuality he never explained.
Briefly, around 1925 Freud set about providing an explanation for why (supposedly) an infant girl’s attachment to her mother (a phenomenon he has only just ‘discovered’!) is rejected by the child, and replaced by Oedipal desires for her father. No summary can do justice to the wonders of Freud’s accounts of female psycho-sexual development. For instance, when an infant girl catches sight of the male genitals: “She makes her decision in a flash. She has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it.” Freud conjures up several explanations for the supposed infant girls’ rejection of their mother in favour of their father, including that the mother failed to feed them sufficiently, shared her love with others, aroused their sexual activity and then forbade it, and that they have a fear of being murdered or poisoned by her. In the third of his accounts he tells us that these explanations (“which analysis brings to light”!) do not suffice to account for the rejection of the mother. He now reports the “specific factor” that does the trick: “It was, however, a surprise to learn from analyses that girls hold their mothers responsible for their lack of a penis and do not forgive her for their being at a disadvantage.” [See *Seductive Mirage*, pp. 140-151]
It is worth noting here a couple of Freud’s persuasive techniques. By saying this ‘finding’ is “a surprise” he implies it is a genuine discovery (rather than the figment of his imagination it actually is). And by writing that his contentions are the result of “analysis” (and even “established beyond doubt”!) he implies there is a solid basis for his ‘findings’, when it is evident that he has scoured his imagination for anything that comes to hand.
Now we come to the passage cited by Warnotck. Freud tells us that “The turning away from the mother [around age four] is accompanied by hostility; the attachment to the mother ends in hate. A hate of that kind may become very striking and last through life; it may be carefully overcompensated later on.” It is regard to this latter sentence that I noted that this illustrates a typical Freudian device: “Should one observe a close affection of a daughter for her mother, one should not be deceived. It may merely be a manifestation of overcompensated hate.” My point was, of course, that even if what Freud postulates is apparently not the case for specific individuals, it does not refute his thesis: Whichever way it turns out, Freud can show it is consistent with his contentions. *That* is the point I was making in the passage cited by Warntock, the one to which he makes an objection.
Warnotck wants to me to tell him on what grounds one decides that an explanation is implausible. There is, of course, no hard and fast principle, one has to make these judgements for oneself. Some seem to be pretty easy. The contention that it is a general feature of female psycho-sexual development that girls around the age of four experience a long-lasting hatred for their mother, and that this comes about because they fear they are being poisoned by her, and because they blame her for their lack of a penis, is one such case. Another example that I’ve already given (and which Warnotck evidently finds plausible) is the following train of events supposedly explaining homosexuality: A boy observes his young sister is lacking a penis and thinks that she will eventually grow one, leading to the idea of a “woman with a penis”, which idea becomes fixated so that in adulthood he “is unable to do without a penis in his love object”.
I can’t help feeling that the description “implausible” doesn’t do full justice to such explanations. As Ernest Gellner wrote in *The Psychoanalytic Movement* after quoting a passage from Freud: “If you are satisfied with this kind of explanation, you’ll be satisfied with anything.”
Re: Alan Esterson’s post below
All of which goes to ‘prove’ what I’ve always believed: that Herr Freud is an unsung comic genius….
Allen Esterson describes Freud’s position as: “Should one observe a close affection of a daughter for her mother, one should not be deceived. It may merely be a manifestation of overcompensated hate.”
Note the importance of the word ‘may.’ Freud is raising the possibility that apparent love may be disguised hate in some cases, not insisting that this must always be true. The crucial ‘may’ leaves open the possibility that Freud’s claims about the development of the oedipus complex in girls might sometimes be mistaken.
In contrast, by calling Freud’s raising of the possibility that apparent love may sometimes be disguised hate a ‘sleight of hand’, Esterson is insisting that apparent love can never be disguised hate. No one can be sure how Esterson knows this, or how that claim could possibly be proved or disproved. Esterson’s standpoint is more dogmatic than Freud’s.
Warntock ignores the context in which the comment he cites was made. Freud has postulated that in the process of psycho-sexual development young girls, around age four, undergo a profound emotional change during which a close attachment to the mother is replaced by Oedipal desires for the father. In the course of this change the original love for the mother changes to hatred. To explain what sets in motion this preposterous scenario, Freud posits several absurd ‘reasons’ why the little girl turns away from her mother, the most important of which is that the mother didn’t provide her with a penis. He writes that the hatred experienced by the girl for her mother in this period may last all through life. It is at this point he produces his characteristic Freudian manoeuvre that allows him to contend that whatever the eventually, it is consistent with his thesis: If you perceive affection of an older girl or woman for her mother, it may be a form of disguised hatred.
Now after the string of absurdities doled out by Freud one would think the reader would recognise his last contention as an example of his refutation-evasion devices. Not Warnotck. At the end of this whole preposterous flight of fancy all he can do is suggest that there may be substance to Freud’s suggestion that affection may be overcompensated hate. Apparently he doesn’t see that the absurd context in which Freud comes up with his “overcompensated hate” remark makes it unworthy of consideration.
Warnotck writes that “Esterson is insisting that apparent love can never be disguised hate”. In fact I didn’t express an opinion on such an issue, my comment was purely about a refutation-evading device in a specific context. If I were to respond to his contention, to start with I would want to know what Warntock means by “apparent love”. But there’s no way I’m now going to get into a debate on this with someone who ignores the central point of virtually everything I write, and finds something extraneous on which he thinks he can gain a point.
One of the points Warntock has evaded is my question about whether he gives credence to the preposterous account of the homosexuality of the Wolf Man I described in an earlier post, or the “woman with a penis” explanation of homosexuality in some men. The implication of some of his comments is that he regards this and other examples I’ve supplied as credible explanations, thereby indicating he is in the company of those of whom one can say, with Gellner: “If you are satisfied with this kind of explanation, you’ll be satisfied with anything.” With such people there comes a time when one has to say enough is enough, I withdraw.
There was no need for Allen Esterson to go over Freud’s thinking on the development of the oedipus complex in girls again, thank you. Most readers probably have good enough memories that they don’t need it repeated.
Esterson is convinced it is preposterous and absurd, but what is more preposterous and absurd in my view is to express that opinion without being able to give any good reasons.
Most preposterous and absurd of all is to insist that what seems to be love (what else could “apparent love” mean, given the way English is normally used?) must be love and not hatred, for example. Unfortunately this is what Esterson insists on in page 146 of his book – at least as far as mothers and their daughters are concerned. I see no reason why only love between mothers and their daughters must be genuine, so forgive me for taking this as a general denial that what seems to be love can ever be anything else.
That is literally the worst argument anyone writing a book about Freud could make. Far from disproving the theory that Freud’s critics are motivated by emotion rather than reason, it supports it. To call raising an obvious possiblity about the nature of emotion a ‘sleight of hand’ is precisely an emotional and not a rational response. This is not an extraneous point, but a crucial, central issue.
Esterson also thinks Freud’s explanations of homosexuality are preposterous, but that, as they say, is just his opinion. Esterson is not a homosexual himself, I suppose (he is welcome to correct me if I am wrong). I would prefer to trust the judgment of someone who is both a homosexual and an intelligent writer.
Andrew Sullivan is both these things, and his discussion of the psychoanalytic theories of male homosexuality in Love Undetectable is superior to that of professional psychologist Malcolm Macmillan in Freud Evaluated. It will also be much more widely read and influential. Some anti-gay psychologists have noticed it, and quoted it in their books. I expect it will turn out to be a turning point in the debate.
Returning to Frederick Crew’s homophobia, let me point out the unfortunate consequences of Esterson’s reasoning. If Crews did not say that homosexuality was not a mental illness in 1980 because he did not have to, one has to conclude that Crews did say homosexuality was not a mental illness in 1993 because he did have to. I wonder why.
“If Crews did not say that homosexuality was not a mental illness in 1980 because he did not have to, one has to conclude that Crews did say homosexuality was not a mental illness in 1993 because he did have to” writes Richard Warnotck. What utter rubbish. How about taking into account the context of what is being written? As has been explained, nothing in any quote from Crews adduced by Warnotck allows one to deduce Crews’s attitute to homosexuality, whether pro or anti. In some cases Crews was writing about the bad effects of Freudianism, while in the DSM quote he was considering how much the contents of what should be a reliable scientific tool are dependent on politicking by cabals rather than on
research.
Is Warnotck trying to get the record for the highest number of illogical statements in a debate? He is nothing more than an intellectual spear-tackler.
I am writing as one of the co-authors of *Astrology, Science and Culture*, “reviewed” by Geoff Dean for this website. On p. 107, n. 7 therein, I mention that Dean, as a longstanding critic of astrology, has two principal rhetorical strategies: “One is to tendentiously ‘summarize’ his opponents’s arguments and then deal with the resulting creation. The other is to engage in apparently endless reply and counter-reply, while conceding nothing, to the point where his opponents sensibly decide that the process has become fruitless and decline to continue – whereupon Dean claims victory.”
The first strategy is what, yet again, he has done with our book, and I have no intention (having a life) of giving him the opportunity to engage in the second. So I will only comment that it is a shame that Dean continues to refuse to engage with – as opposed to merely attempting to destroy – any arguments which throw into question his own foundational assumptions. (Thinking is hard, but that’s no excuse.)
For the same reason, I would invite readers, if they are interested in the subject, to read the book for themselves and then make up their own minds.
Patrick Curry
“The graveyard of the gods isn’t yet full. But gone are the deities of the ancient Egyptians, Vikings, Aztecs, and the like, all of whom once played a role in filling the gaps in human understanding of how nature works.”
While the aformentioned gods aren’t seen as the powers behind natural events (by most)they are still followed. If Christians etc could do the same the world might be a safer place.