Almost every anti-Freudian I have found thinks every word written by Freud must be either true or a clear demonstration of his sham.
As a non-Psychoanalyst and a scientist I can tell you that an enormous part of our search for knowledge of ourselves as people and a culture is lost when we limit our endeavour to simple, repeatable experiments in simple laboratory conditions.
You don’t like, just as Freud eventually didn’t, the first attempts of Freud to envision a model of the mind. But somebody has to look beyond Conductism and develop a good model of our most important asset (our minds).
It is naive to expect a model of our minds to just pop up so we can then verify it with simple lab experiments. And it is naive to think that because Freud’s model of the mind completely lacks a guide to double-blind, repeatable experiments we should forever stay away from the right search.
Scientific exploration should not shy away from the hard work of searching for the right answer just because some Freud or another did not, like Newton or Einstein did, find all the possible answers for the next several decades.
Re Prof. Villarreal’s comment: I wonder where, in my correspondence with Newsweek, he finds me saying that a viable model of the mind should “just pop up,” much less that “we should forever stay away from the right search.” This is crude straw-man stuff.
Quite a few Freudians have themselves appealed to psychological experiments as a source of validation. The very poor quality of such studies–exposed as such by Eysenck & Wilson, Erwin, and others–reflects the chief problem with psychoanalytic theory, namely, a complete absence of concern for alternative (and less counterintuitive) explanations.
Regarding O’Reilly – “A rich white guy aligned with the ruling party who has the guts to stand up to the élitists.”
Huh? Did you read the same New Yorker article that I did? You know, the one you linked to, and gave the above teaser quote?
In “The New Yorker” article O’Reilly is rightly depicted as an unbalanced bully. Where do you get the part about standing up to elitists? O’Reilly is popular with the white male crowd because he reinforces their fears and supports their shallow worldview. He doesn’t stand up to elitists. He is an elitist.
The moslem world has consistently shown lack of manners, brutish conduct, a tendency to murderous behavior and “we” have shown understanding, patience or just a utter lack of concern for the people under their bigotted, backward regimes. Under the guise of non-involvement the western world has ignored the plight of many millions of humans suffering because Mohamad wanted it that way. Now the western world is paying its dues, the Moslems have arrived in droves demanding respect for a religion that has no respect for its own members. The western world is coming to terms with the menace, albeit slowly. The US president George Bush (The son) repeatedly declared that the wars in Afganistan and then Irak were against terrorism, it is in fact waged against Islam. May it be a success. Amen!
We talk rather too much about rights and respect (not that I’m against them, but different people have different ideas. Surely the simple fact is that everyone has to accept some responsibility for the consequences of their actions. And if they can’t foresee the consequences, then perhaps they should have been more careful what they said, did, whatever.
Moreover, this applies as much to those who take unreasonable offence as to those who give it, whether unintentionally or not.
I see now that the O’Reilley article by Nicholas Lehman contained a direct reference to the rich white guy syndrome – the guy who regards himself as a little guy doing battle against the elitists. Lehman diplomatically depicts O’Reilley as “beyond irony”, which is perhaps another way of saying “shallow and humorless.”
I am reminded of the recent commercial where a rugged CEO is explaining to his young assistant that he is now “sticking it to the man” with his new cell phone plan. To which the assistant replies, “but… you are the man. So …. isn’t that like sticking it to yourself?” “Maybe,” replies the CEO. O’Reilley the maverick!
Actually what stuck with me from my (first) reading of the article is the sense of self-pity which permeates O’Reilley’s stance to the world. He sees himself as victimized by mainstream media and does indeed see himself as representing the little guy – a sort of adolescent approach to the world, with no self perspective and no sense of humor. The reason Keith Olberman is able to go after him so effectively is precisely because Olberman refuses to take himself so seriously.
Let me try to clarify my point: while I have seen in my everyday life a lot of psychological research results being used in everything from job interviews to treatment of phobias, with terrible results, I have seen in Psychoanalysts I know a true willingness to understand the process beneath the visible expression of somebody’s conduct.
It is clear to me that many Psychoanalysts are truly trying to understand the human mind without reading Freud, Jung, Klein or others as gospel, while almost every psychologist I know is giving or taking away job opportunities based on family structure, speed for simple arithmetic problems and other oversimplified views of us as humans.
It has also been painfully clear to me that far too much importance is given by some psychologists to poorly understood statistical analysis: I have even participated in studies where literally thousands of combinations of variables were put through tens of statistical tests in an attempt to let the computer do the understanding and avoid the pesky “cause and effect” relationships.
I also know that psychoanalysts are aware that their discipline urgently needs scientific validation and that there is a true concern that their diagnosis always might be accurate or just a figment of the analyst’s imagination.
I am not interested in contradicting or refuting your article in Newsweek, and my comments were not directed towards that goal. I am sorry if I gave that impression. I would just like to see in psychologists a greater acknowledgement of the enormous feat of understanding the human mind, and the risks involved in pretending that we are ready to understand it through statistical analysis of current psychological tests.
There is a very good and well-attended course at Michigan State University taught by a psychologist-psychoanalyst (Bertram Karon, Ph.D.; “Personality-Psychoanalytic Perspectives”) that takes Freud’s central ideas (dynamic unconscious processes)seriously.
Of course considering only this one paper can lead one in a variety of directions, and I acknowledge that the one I’m focusing on here is scarcely relevant to the point James is making. But I think it does have some importance, in that it shows that people are still being misled by Freud’s writings about his clinical experiences (and that the psychoanalytic world is frequently oblivious to the critical research on Freud). Karon writes:
“Freud, referring specifically to conversion hysterics, reported that the incest memories they related in psychoanalysis were revealed more often to be fantasies than real events, although in many cases, according to Freud, they were undoubtedly real (Freud, 1917, p.370).”
But were the bulk of “incest memories” alluded to here either patients’ phantasies or memories – or were they actually Freud’s own *analytic reconstructions* of unconscious ideas that he misleadingly presented as if they emanated from the patients? With regard to the patients of the “seduction theory” period to which Freud frequently referred back in his writings about incest it is very evident that the latter is the case, as I’ve argued on several occasions, including here on Butterflies and Wheels:
(For the full argument with documentation see the references to my articles at the end.)
I have examined in detail the specific reference given by Karon (above) to show how Freud misled his readers in his general expositions on the incest issue as well as in his retrospective accounts of the seduction theory. See:
I haven’t time at this moment to look more closely at Karon’s article, but it is unfortunate that he is still citing this material from Freud as if it is unproblematic.
Isn’t this essentially the same Vedic authoritarianism that Shakyamuni Buddha addressed 2500 years ago? It looks like there are some, both then and now, that haven’t gotten the message.
Re James Jones’ reporting that “there is a very good and well-attended course at Michigan State University taught by a psychologist-psychoanalyst (Bertram Karon, Ph.D.; Personality-Psychoanalytic Perspectives’) that takes Freud’s central ideas (dynamic unconscious processes) seriously”:
For anyone who’s interested (and I don’t suppose many are following this particular topic with baited breath) I’ve now skimmed through Karon’s article on schizophrenia that I previously cited, and I can’t say I’m impressed. In fact quite the reverse. For starters there’s the usual kind of psychoanalytic reporting style that has one wondering just how much is coming from the patient and how much is the interpretation of the analyst. With Karon’s contending that apparently irrational utterances of schizophrenics have meanings that can be deciphered by psychoanalytic interpretation we are in the territory of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (whom he cites and of whom I know little). I can’t say from my brief searches on Karon how he conducts his psychotherapy sessions, though I’m unimpressed by the kind of theoretical ideas he alludes to in the aforementioned article. To take the more straightforward examples, e.g., he writes that “hallucinations are entirely understandable by Freud’s (1900, 1917, 1933) theories of dreams, with a few additions”. And again: “As is widely cited, Freud derived many paranoid delusions from the fear of homosexuality…”, following which he cites favourably Freud’s rather absurd 1915 paper purportedly demonstrating that his theory that paranoia derives from the repression of homosexual feelings can be shown to be valid even when on the surface the case in question seems to be inconsistent with it. Yes, as James writes, Karon takes Freud’s central ideas seriously – but should we take Karon seriously when he does so?
Karon’s claims that better therapeutic results with schizophrenics have been obtained with psychoanalytic psychotherapy than with drug treatments, but I remain skeptical. Much of the evidence he supplies here is anecdotal. The one study he cites fails to include a control group that undergoes an equivalent amount of *non-psychoanalytic* psychotherapy so that it can be seen whether the psychoanalytic elements in the therapy are significant, rather than just the fact that attention and sympathy is given to the patient by a concerned individual over an extended period of time.
As a feminist and an experimental psychologist, I am often asked what I think of Freud. My answer is that although Freud undoubtedly wrote a great deal of nonsense about women, he was a genius whose theories of the unconscious were a huge step forward in understanding human motivation. If nothing else, women owe him a great deal for definitely putting to rest the notion that they should be punished for preying on men as succubi. I found the Newsweek articles as well done as such superficial treatment can be and agree with a subsequent letter to the editor saying that “No one castigates Henry Ford because his Model-T’s don’t run in the Indy 500 today. Freud’s brilliant prototypes opened up vast horizons for centuries of exploration.” Having discovered this site (butterfliesandwheels) only yesterday, I was interested to read Frederick Crews’s commentary but unfortunately, I was not impressed. The one point I agree with him about is that in Canada at least, I doubt that any psychology department is treating Freudianism as anything other than a historical curiosity. That appears to be the case for two reasons: 1) “pure” Freud has not been fashionable since the 1950s, though there have been signs that this may be changing following recent interest by neuroscientists; and 2) Freud’s influence is omnipresent in the teaching of psychology in an indirect manner, mediated through his many disciples; for example cognitive behavioral therapy, which is currently widely taught and very popular, is inconceivable without Freud. For Crews’ view about the lack of scientific validation of Freud’s ideas, I refer you to the comments by Andres Villarreal, in which I fully concur. As for Crews’ argument that Freud was not the first to speak of “the irrational” and of sexuality, I refer him to Thomas Kuhn, who pointed out that most great advances in science are made on the basis of already-available evidence, which is why several thinkers often have similar ideas to that of the person who is credited with an invention. Of course, Freud had the advantage of being much more creative and more articulate than Krafft-Ebing et al. Finally, Crews makes much of the aliquis controversy, in which Freud is alleged to have attributed to an acquaintance a chain of free association that was actually his own. Assuming this to be true, I say “Big Deal!” This trivial transposition did not harm anyone and was allegedly done to protect the privacy of Freud’s sister-in-law. It is certainly not serious enough to support Crews’ conclusion that this demonstrates that Freud was “unscrupulous” and “a charlatan.” Since Crews has clearly tried hard to find evidence to debunk Freud’s reputation, it is amazing that this insignificant anecdote is the worst he could find.
Frederick Crews can, of course, speak very eloquently for himself, but in the meantime I’ll take up a few of the points made by Louise.
She writes:
>Freud’s influence is omnipresent in the teaching of psychology in an indirect manner, mediated through his many disciples; for example cognitive behavioral therapy, which is currently widely taught and very popular, is inconceivable without Freud.<
Rather than CBT being inconceivable without Freud (which is certainly false, as its basic notions do not in any way derive from Freud), a strong case could be made that it (or something similar) might well have been developed earlier without the all-pervading influence of Freud in psychotherapeutic circles. Possibly Louise is under the widely-held misconception that psychotherapy started with Freud, when in fact Benedikt, Féré and Janet in Europe were all practising one-to-one psychotherapy before Freud, and psychotherapy was practised in the United States prior to the visit by Freud in 1909 that ignited interest in his ideas there.
>As for Crews’ argument that Freud was not the first to speak of ‘the irrational’ and of sexuality, I refer him to Thomas Kuhn, who pointed out that most great advances in science are made on the basis of already-available evidence, which is why several thinkers often have similar ideas to that of the person who is credited with an invention.<
That presupposes that what Freud wrote on these topics was actually an advance, whereas he frequently took pre-Freudian insights and extended them into his own overarching conceptual schema or far-fetched scenarios that his critics consider to be unsubstantiated (and, in the case of sexuality, not infrequently absurd).
On the subject of the invention of the “aliquis” encounter, Louise writes:
>Assuming this to be true, I say ‘Big Deal!’ This trivial transposition did not harm anyone and was allegedly done to protect the privacy of Freud’s sister-in-law. It is certainly not serious enough to support Crews’ conclusion that this demonstrates that Freud was ‘unscrupulous’ and ‘a charlatan.’ Since Crews has clearly tried hard to find evidence to debunk Freud’s reputation, it is amazing that this insignificant anecdote is the worst he could find.<
Louise fails to appreciate that Crews referred to this episode because it was raised in the “Newsweek” article. Crews himself noted: “The people who mention it most often are Freudians, who cite it as an absurdity that typifies the thinking of all ‘Freud bashers’.” On Louis’s general point here, if this were an isolated instance one might accept it is of no great significance. However, Freud deceitfully invented an individual and dialogue on at least one other occasion, and grossly misrepresented episodes in the early period of psychoanalysis, and his clinical experiences, on several occasions. Crews really has no problem in providing evidence for more serious transgressions.
Louise quotes a letter writer to “Newsweek”
>”Freud’s brilliant prototypes opened up vast horizons for centuries of exploration”<
Leaving aside the absurd hyperbole here, it would be much closer to the truth to say his conceptual schema were frequently blind alleys, and (especially in the States) for a long period his influence effectively inhibited areas of research (such as non-psychoanalytic dream research) and advances in psychiatric practice.
>My answer is that although Freud undoubtedly wrote a great deal of nonsense about women…<
He also wrote a great deal of nonsense about men.
I have a question not addressed in the likes of the DSM-IV… Evidense shows that Freud’s adding the mystique of the “un-conscious mind” sealed the deal making psycho-therapy the only and obvious option to “mental illness”… My question is, if the human mind is responsible for processing thought, when was the last time your unconscious mind had an unconscious thought??? Corrolary: …and how did you know???
Concerning Meera Nanda’s article on traditional Indian medicine, Meera sensibly describes the problems with it, but then suggests that there may be something to it after all because it has stood the test of time. Well…astrology, Christianity, and witchcraft have been around for quite a while too–Is it possible that these beliefs and practices are not as irrational and false as I had thought?
Freudianism may be little more than a historical curiousity in psych depts generally, but there are still serious question marks over its influence on psychotherapeutic practise.
My own beef is the idea that morality is rooted in the ‘castration complex.’ Fear of losing the penis, albeit unconscious, is the supposed basis for the adult conscience: the so-called ‘superego.’ Because girls have nothing to lose – literally! – they do not develop the same trenchant morality af men.
The idea that women are psychosexually ‘programmed’ to be morally inferior has historically raised quite a few hackles. And not just among feminists. The ‘superego’ is a mytho-poeic construct, an attempt to account for morality exclusively in terms of consequence. For Freudians, only the law can logically guarantee
socialised behaviour.
Freud, in my view, failed to grasp the conceptual distinction between ‘conscience’and ‘consequence’. The latter maybe accounted for in terms of the superego – if you limit it to men. But the former is a function of both empathy and imagination: it cannot be understood in a psychosexual theory that reduces all human behaviour to sex and aggression.
Thank you for your note. Whether many things Freud wrote are right or wrong, I think it is our mission to try and grasp his whole vision of the mind and improve or change it, instead of fighting around the fact that his theories seem, at first, counter-intuitive.
Many want to find the unconscious part of the mind, preferably in an exact spot in the brain, and expect to understand and see that unconscious thought in a tangible way before accepting the possibility that something might be right in this model of the mind. If we translate that to other fields of science, it is like wanting to see an electron before accepting the possibility of its existance. In fact, electrons were studied and models of its behaviour were created before it was undeniably proven to exist.
If we had clearly better models, Freud would already be side by side with Ptholomey, in the waste bin of Science.
As to Edmund Standing’s piece. It’s clever and maybe accurate and is written ( I assume) to demonstrate that we in the west are just as bad as anyone else…the equivalency rif…the Koran isn’t all that bad…just look at our Bible…it says the same awful things! You know the Bush = bin Ladin business.
Only one small issue: western foreign policy is not based on a moral superiority derived from the Bible. (Right now it’s based on pure stupidity with little basis whatsoever.) At one time it may have been and was Bible-based — but then is then and now is now.
Anyway, I was surprised to see such a snobby little piece here on B&W.
Btw, these letters are very well-hidden and seem to be only accessible via an article. You might receivemore comments if people could see that there was commentary.
Another aide. I visit this site because of Ophelia’s and readers comments, not links to articles. I’d be more interested than not in why you choose an article…what you think is important, significant etc etc
Have to agree. Standing ignores an essential fact: that church and state are separate in the West.
It also assumes that all who call themselves Christian are literal-minded half-wits. Some are, but most are no more driven to bloodthirstiness by the Bible than readers of history are: they know they’d find themselves behind bars pronto.
I see that Frederick Crews doesn’t even mention homosexuality in his list of the ’embarrassments’ of psychoanalytic theory in his latest article. Gee, I wonder why not.
Seriously, I think we should know perfectly well why not. What a laugh. Forgive my sneering, but when enough time passes for people to consider the reasons behind the decline of psychoanalysis objectively, Crews’s comments on the homosexual issue will produce a permanent and extremely unattractive stain on his reputation.
Those interested may note that Offing Culture in Out of My System is another of Crews’s articles where homosexuals get mentioned in the same breath as psychotics – although there, unlike in Analysis Terminable, Crews at least indicates that
he considers psychosis worse even than homosexuality. Crews’s attitudes seem to have got more rancid as the 1970s wore on.
The last time Richard Warnotck was here I invited him to condemn New Zealanders on the ground that having viewed their rugby captain try to murder an opponent in a spear tackle, their failure to condemn this felony meant they saw nothing wrong with it. He declined this challenge, sensing that to accept it would involve either condemning all New Zealanders (people who have email addresses like rwarnotck@yahoo.co.nz) or thinking that to infer agreement from the absence of disagreement, or acceptance from lack of condemnation, is not always correct.
So I repeat my challenge: can he show any difference between the logic in saying that Crews’ failure to condemn anti-homosexual prejudice means Crews is anti-homosexual, and in saying that the failure of New Zealanders to condemn that spear tackle means they see nothing wrong with it?
‘western foreign policy is not based on a moral superiority derived from the Bible’.
1. Current (and past) US policy regarding Israel has been greatly affected by the ideology of Christian Zionism espoused by millions of born-again Christians in America, and is/has been undoubtedly an influence on Bush and his circle.
2. Bush regularly cites his ‘faith’, quotes from the Bible and so on, to back up his positions. He believes his foreign policy IS influenced by a biblical worldview and by the God of the Bible.
The problem with Crews’s comments was not that they failed to condemn anti-homosexual prejudice: the problem was that they were expressions of anti-homosexual prejudice.
So I repeat my challenge: ask people who are not friends or admirerers of Frederick Crews what they think he meant. If you don’t know any such people, you need to get out more.
One more thought. Crews can’t claim to be a brave free-thinker and at the same time appeal to majority opinion when it suits him.
That Crews can conclude that Freud’s theories have no merit because, ‘for several decades now, the major journals of the field have completely ignored all psychoanalytic claims’, shows that he is an intellectual conformist, a follower of scientific herds.
Despite years of arguments over PC, it doesn’t seem to have occured to Crews that there might be reasons of politics or intellectual fashion behind the neglect of psychoanalysis. I can only assume that he is so deeply dominated by the current fashions that this is literally unimaginable to him.
It will eventually become clear, after decades of painful experience, that Crews’s approach is a disastrous mistake. It’s the other way around: rather than the rejection of psychoanalysis by western culture showing that there is something very wrong with psychoanalysis, it shows that there is something very wrong with western culture.
At a time when western culture is facing such severe threats from without, perhaps it is not surprising that people want to reject evidence that it is also rotting from within. If Freud’s theories on human nature have some essential truth to them, then their rejection would be the most decisive evidence that western culture is dying.
“The problem with Crews’s comments was not that they failed to condemn anti-homosexual prejudice: the problem was that they were expressions of anti-homosexual prejudice.”
I should remind him that the only evidence he adduced for this is a comment by Crews damning the distress caused to parents who were told they caused their children’s homosexuality. Indeed, on encountering a later comment by Crews that explicitly showed Crews is not anti-homosexual, Warnotck then claimed that this showed a change in Crews’ views.
And yet again he ducked my challenge. How brave of him. Can I deduce from his silence that he is a coward?
Crews’s complaint about parental guilt in Analysis Terminable is enough to show that his view of homosexuality was very negative at that time. It does not distinguish between suggesting that parents are responsible for their children becoming homosexual and suggesting that parents ought to feel guilty.
If you write as though those suggestions were one, it can only be because you think that guilt is an appropriate reaction to causing your child to become homosexual.
(The complaint was not even fully accurate, by the way, since analysts such as Edmund Bergler strongly denied that parents had any responsibility for their children becoming homosexual. See Bergler’s article on The Tragedy of Parents of Young Homosexuals in his 1959 book One Thousand Homosexuals).
That complaint wasn’t the only basis for my accusation. There was also Crews’s unfortunate statement, with its sneering and smugly self-congratulatory tone that he must have thought dreadfully smart at the time, ‘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).
Consider what ‘replaces’ means. It means to substitute something for something else. When one thing is substituted for another thing as a mental aberration, one thing has become a mental aberration and the other has ceased to be a mental aberration. If you object to something substituting for something else as a mental aberration, you are objecting to both parts of this process.
In this case, that means objecting to both the fact that homosexuality is no longer deemed a mental aberration and the fact that smoking is now deemed to be one. Which makes Crews’s much later complaint about how psychoanalysis deemed homosexuality a mental disorder revoltingly hypocritical.
The editors of the New York Review of Books, who presumably knew about his past statements on the issue, did Crews a major disservice by not politely telling him that he would make a fool of himself by complaining about homosexuality having been deemed a mental illness in ‘The Unknown Freud’.
GW Bush’s claim that his polices derive from his faith are as credible as his claim that Iraq was an immediate danger.
I have never gotten any sense that Bush was religious; he may claim to be but I simply don’t believe it. He is – oddly enough — totally secular and his ‘faith’ is of one who folloows a convenient and malleable voting bloc.
More importantly, one swallow does not make a summer and one President in the past 80 years hardly proves Standing’s point. That goes for US polciy on Israel; the evangelical support is quite recent and represents only one part of a vast foreign policy. How, for example, does religion effect American foreign policy with, say, Argentina?
No, Mr. Standing, you’ll have to dig a bit deeper.
Richard Warnotck writes “If you write as though those suggestions were one, it can only be because you think that guilt is an appropriate reaction to causing your child to become homosexual” .
No: the original problem is his conflation of two separate things: the notion that anti-homosexual prejudice is wrong and the notion that it is ok to punish anti-homosexual parents of homosexual children by lying to them by telling them they caused the homosexuality. Warnotck thinks it’s ok to punish such parents in this way and that to object to this punishment is itself anti-homosexual. Similarly one could say that to think it wrong to put Holocaust-denier David Irving in jail is to be a Holocaust denier, that objecting to the castration of rapists is the same as promoting rape, that to oppose the death penalty for murder is to think killing people is ok and so on.
Then there’s this: “There was also Crews’s unfortunate statement, with its sneering and smugly self-congratulatory tone that he must have thought dreadfully smart at the time, ‘Quite true: when smoking replaces homosexuality as a mental aberration, more of the credit must go to caucuses than to new findings'”. This mean Crews thinks that psychiatry has no better reason to consider smoking a mental aberration that it previously had for the same attitude to homosexuality.
It’s the devotion to that long-exposed charlatan Freud that is the problem. A prime example being the soft of nonsense beng peddled by Richard Warnotck. (Mis-)Read all sorts of adsurdities into simple language, insist on hidden meanings where none exist, and then used your allegedly deep insights into the real mindset of the author as weapons against him: the master fraudster could not do it better.
BTW: since the quotations from Crews are decades old, and no one else has noticed his alleged homophobia, does this mean that everybody but Richard Warnotck is an “illiterate”?
The accusation of illiteracy is not an ad hominem insult. It is based on Power’s inability to understand what “replaces” means. No one may have commented on the homophobia of Crews’s comments before me, but probably many people have noticed it.
Anyone who finds it unbelievable that people would notice Crew’s homophobia but remain silent about it has no idea just how badly western culture has decayed over the last few decades – the same period during which, as Crews notes, the major psychology journals have ignored psychoanalytic claims.
The principle is the same: ignore whatever is embarrassing and doesn’t suit your agenda.
1)”The accusation of illiteracy is not an ad hominem insult”. Not always an insult, but without doubt an insult when used in this manner: “If I were a literary critic under attack for something or other, I’d be a bit embarrassed to sit back and let illiterates defend me”
2) “The principle is the same: ignore whatever is embarrassing and doesn’t suit your agenda”. Here Richard Warnotck describes a large part of his debating style – anyone for a spear-tackle?
3) “If you object to something substituting for something else as a mental aberration, you are objecting to both parts of this process. In this case, that means objecting to both the fact that homosexuality is no longer deemed a mental aberration and the fact that smoking is now deemed to be one.”
Suppose a country has 3 political parties and a general election replaces government of party A by party B. A television reporter does a “vox pop”, asking people what they think of the election result.
a) Supporters of party A say they are unhappy with the replacement: their case is described by Warnotck’s claim.
b) Supporters of party B say they are happy with the replacement: their case is also described by Warnotck’s claim.
c) Supporters of party C say they are unhappy because they wanted their party to win. This is impossible according to Warnotck: to be unhappy with a replacement one must have been happy with the status quo ante.
d) Anarchists say they are unahappy with the replacement because they want no government at all. Again, impossible according to Warnotck.
In Warnotck’s world,”a pox on both your houses” in illogical. Here ends my latest display of illiteracy.
Someone needs to teach Richard Warnotck how to philosophise. One of the basic techniques is to convert the particular into the general and see if the general makes sense. That’s why logic converts claims into forms like “If A is true then B is true. B is true. Therefore A is true”. By looking at the sort of thinking involved one sees that claims like these are invalid in general. It allows for counterexamples to be formed. “If Socrates is human then Socrates is mortal. Socrates is mortal. Therefore Socrates is human”. Now “Socrates is human ” could be true , but not if Socrates is a cat.
Amd that’s what I’ve done to Warnotck’s inane ramblings in dictionaryland regarding the meaning of “replace”. I have converted his particular claim to a general one and shown it to be nonsense. The idea that to be unhappy with a replacement implies one was happy with the status quo ante only makes sense if the two options – before and after – are mutually exclusive and have no third or other alternatives. Yet it is obvious that the two options in his particular example are not mutually exclusive. There are homosexual smokers who will not be happy with either their homosexuality or their smoking being described as a mental illness. And there are anti-homosexual anti-smokers who are not happy for different reasons.
At some point even Warnotck will have to give up on what we might call his “kiwi logic” and accept that it does not fly.
In the true analytic style you have managed to turn an argument about Freud into a nonsense exercise in which longwinded examples involving A’s and B’s are deployed to prove that language is a neutral substance that can only transmit bits of dehumanized information, that any attempt to pierce the surface of what is explicitly said to unearth the subjective position of the person doing the writing is sophistry, etc. I will indulge in what I believe is called “rank psychologizing” here: it is hard not to come to the conclusion that the impressive proliferation of logical refutations of Mr. Warnotck’s position (“rank philosophizing”, if you will) masks a certain degree of enjoyment at being able to run language into the ground, rob it of anything but its explicit meaning, and make it boring as hell, all in the name of “free thinking”. This myth of the “free thinker” is a rough one: having come to this website by chance, and not as a Free Thinker, I was struck by the degree to which most of the verbiage on display hews to a certain style, a certain feel. As far as I can tell, “free thinking” is the philosophical equivalent of Libertarianism: a way of saying nothing while saying something, an excuse to avoid confronting anything real.
Richard Warnotck has commited a series of logical errors which I have been trying to demonstrate to him. Anyone is free to read anything into anything and speculate wildly, but they’d better have good evidence and error-free logic if they want to convert speculation into definite conclusions and utter slurs.
I will not let such bad behaviour go unchallenged. In this I am a Jonesist, a philosophy named after the much loved Corporal Jones of BBC TV program “Dad’s Army” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dad's_Army). He used to say, pointing to his bayonet: “They don’t like it up ’em!”.
Power writes, ‘The idea that to be unhappy with a replacement implies one was happy with the status quo ante only makes sense if the two options – before and after – are mutually exclusive and have no third or other alternatives.’ This is not true, however.
To be unhappy with a replacement obviously means that you were happy with the previous state of affairs if you write in a way which indicates that you consider the two options mutually exclusive, and that was how Crews wrote. Shall I quote him again? ”Quite true: when smoking replaces homosexuality as a mental aberration, more of the credit must go to caucuses than to new findings.”
What hint is there of a third opition or possibility in that sentence? None whatever. It is a perfectly straightforward sentence: it indicates that smoking has replaced (which means to substitute for, remember?) homosexuality as a mental aberration, and that Crews disapproves of this replacement.
I am quite sure that Crews understood that it is possible for someone to object to both homosexuality and smoking being deemed mental aberrations. I also understand this possibility. The fact that the possibility existed does not mean that Crews did this.
Richard Warnotck is now admitting his claim is invalid.
If, as he now claims, it is possible to object to homosexuality being deemed a mental illness and to object to smoking being deemed a mental illness, then why is Crews not allowed this possibility?
Here, for the benefit of Warnotck , is his original quote from Crews:
“‘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).” It is obvious that Crews is attacking the modus operandi of the compilers of the third DSM because they made scientific decisions based on politics. Such a critic will clearly want other possibilities: such as a DSM that mentions neither homosexuality nor smoking as meantal aberrations and whose contents are decided solely by looking at the science and the evidence underpinning it.
After his original cite of the above quotation, Warnotck wrote: “Only someone convinced both that smoking is not a ‘mental aberration’ and that homosexuality is one would say that”.
Apparently the possibility of homosexual smokers never occurred to him.
“If, as he now claims, it is possible to object to homosexuality being deemed a mental illness and to object to smoking being deemed a mental illness, then why is Crews not allowed this possibility?”
Because what Crews wrote shows that he chose not to take it.
“To be unhappy with a replacement obviously means that you were happy with the previous state of affairs if you write in a way which indicates that you consider the two options mutually exclusive, and that was how Crews wrote. Shall I quote him again? ‘Quite true: when smoking replaces homosexuality as a mental aberration, more of the credit must go to caucuses than to new findings.’
The Crews quote does not do what Warnotck claims. I’d like to see him try to prove his claim.
Somewhere down the line, this discussion became the gay bashers against the bashers of gay bashers against the bashers of gay bashers bashing.
In the absence of better scientific knowledge, I consider that all questions about homosexuality are better left to be solved case-by-case between patients and health care profesionals.
Most of what we are seeing in these days is power politics where big trophies are at stake, like child adoption, paternal rights, inheritance and so on. Mental aberration, DNS are catch words for a political fight, not for a scientific debate. No one would make a fuss if consumption, high fever or evil eye were listed in the DNS, they would just laugh at any doctor that diagnosed them.
When I was 21, I went through the phonebook to find someone who taught transcendental meditation (TM), thinking it might assist with, well, handling life a bit better.
I found a guru (and I use that term with great irony), and attended 1 month or so of group sessions, during which we were taught the basics of TM (small tricks and techniques to settle the mind). Toward Christmas, our tutor invited us to come back the next year for a weekend course on something called ayurveda.
By that point in time I’d consulted dozens of doctors, nutritionists, Chinese medicinists, naturopaths, and every other conceivable therapist who might be able to help me with what’s come to be known as “irritable bowel syndrome”.
GPs gave me large and useless doses of senna, naturopaths gave me tinctures which I mostly vomited straight back up, acupuncturists charged me a lot of money for no appreciable results, but they all told me one thing: there’s no “cure” for IBS, all you can do is manage the symptoms.
One week after making some slight diet and lifestyle changes in line with the ayurvedic stuff, I went through a day of great intestinal distress. I thought I was going to pass my entire bowel!
From that day forward, and for the last 12 years, I have had no trouble at all with gas, constipation, abdominal pain, nausea, or any of the other lovely symptoms which characterise IBS. I enjoy absolute bowel regularity.
Now, exaggeration is the bane of holistic therapy, but I can’t classify my experience as anything short of a miracle. Ayurveda has improved my life in other ways, but that was the most striking, and the one example I cite when explaining my reasons for living my life in the context of what my partner once called “preposterous, tree-hugging hippy crap”.
Note that a whole year had passed since my “conversion” before I picked up a Deepak Chopra book and discovered, to my lasting horror, that this charlatan is the poster boy for ayurveda. Good lord. It’s like having a statue of Dr Phil outside all public hospitals.
What I found disappointing about this article is that it assumes ayurveda operates by the same principle as conventional medicine: blasting cells with substances to force an effect. It doesn’t.
The nature of ayurveda is participatory, and requires the practitioner to understand the system and themselves. “Magic bullet” cures don’t come into it.
In my understanding and practice of ayurveda, the idea of taking pills as an adjunct to lifestyle changes seems unnecessary, if not absurd.
I have no interest in faith healing. I would like to see ayurveda tested rigorously to determine what, if any, true effect it has.
However, going by the style of this article, I fear it would be conducted as a reductive process of feeding sample groups the various pills and potions labeled “ayurvedic”, then waiting to see if their cancer or diabetes cleared up.
That would be like testing the effect of regular exercise on obesity by getting an obese sample group to sit around eating protein and vitamin supplements without actually exercising.
I suspect that Swami Ramdev is a good, old-fashioned snake-oil salesman, whose commitment to ayurveda is based more on a taste for limousines and lavish houses than the promotion of a health paradigm which I believe to have great, untapped, potential.
The author’s criticism is justified, but I ask readers to consider ayurveda on its broad spectrum of application, not just the efforts of one businessman to sell powdered body parts as a cure-all.
Its a pretty good researched article. However, I wd like to add that if one wants to understand the dynamics and the “way it works” of Ayurveda or Pranayam or Yoga just within the parameters of modern science and technology, then its not going to be easy. Many things can definitely be understood. And many things cannot be understood. Simply, because the modern science doesn’t have the know-how or technology to decipher a great deal of dynamics of mental working and consciousness. Science has hardly understood what exactly is consciousness. Quantum physics is still trying to peep into these domains. Whereas the Indian “science” like Ayurveda, Yoga and Tantra etc have detailed and almost complete explanations of all the layers and dynamics of consciousness. But modern science is faltering here as they try to understand the thing which is trying to understand !!!!!
A concrete example is the book “Occult Chemistry” by Dr. Annie Besant & Leadbeater published years before Rutherford’s Gold leaf experiemnt which proved that atom can be broken. But “Occult Chemistry” had detailed elaborations of not only sub-atomic particles but even quarks and sub-quarks !! And for this they had used the “anima siddhi” technology of Yoga !! And their pre-Rutherford findings have been proved in a research in the University of california by Dr. Stephens Phillips.
Actually, Yoga ( the complete 8-fold yoga, not just physical exercises) is the technology used by ancient Indians where human consciousness itself becomes the instrument to acquire the analytical and synthetical knowledge of all subjects. The ancient Indian knew that on the levels of consciouness the entire cosmos in inter-related and actually a single WHOLE. Even the Bell’s Theorum says that at sub-atomic level the cosmos appears to be inter-related and a single body !! The traditional modern science has been based on the assumption (still taught is schools and colleges) that the material world,as wee see it, it REAL. But, the advances in quantum-physics itself has shattered this assumption !!!
Thus, it is perhaps impossible to explain Ayurveda under the parameters of the “modern science” as this “modern science” doesn’t have adequate understanding of how nature exists and works.
However, there is need to put a stop on quacks and fake people who are tarnishing the image of Ayurveda.
These quacks are in Allopathy also. But there is no hue and cry made against them by “intelelctuals” whose knowledge is chained and conditioned under the “western modern science”.
To put Ramdev baba in quack’s category and to unquestionably accept the samples given “herself” by Vrinda Karat ( who is a known communist with anti-spirituality appraoch) is crossing the limits of a rational debate.
Yashendra Prasad writes “The traditional modern science has been based on the assumption (still taught is schools and colleges) that the material world,as wee see it, it REAL. But, the advances in quantum-physics itself has shattered this assumption !!! ” This is beyond nonsense. If it is saying that Quantum Mechanics shows reality not to exist, it is plain wrong. If it is saying that Quantum Mechanics (QM) required us to revise our thinking on the nature of the physical universe, then QM is just another in a long line of discoveries we in the West have taken in our stride: the microscope, the telescope, relativity, and evolution, to name but a few, have all overthrown long-standing notions and led to huge advances in our knowledge (and consequent ability to control the nasty effects of nature, such as disease).
Whereas India, blessed with all its superior knowledge, is a beacon of enlightenment, with a caste system, animal worship and the murder of babies on the grounds that the child is of the wrong sex, to name but a few of its more advanced practices.
Yashendra Prasad writes that in their “Occult Chemistry” Besant and Leadbetter reported their pre-Rutherford findings that have been proved in a research in the University of California by Dr. Stephens Phillips.
Here are some of those findings obtained by the “astral vision” methodology of Besant and Leadbetter
The first chemical atom selected for this examination was an atom of hydrogen (H). On looking carefully at it, it was seen to consist of six small bodies, contained in an egg-like form. It rotated with great rapidity on its own axis, vibrating at the same time, and the internal bodies performed similar gyrations. The whole atom spins and quivers, and has to be steadied before exact observation is possible. The six little bodies are arranged in two sets of three, forming two triangles that are not interchangeable, but are related to each other as object and image. (The lines in the diagram of it on the gaseous sub-plane are not lines of force, but show the two triangles; on a plane surface the interpenetration of the triangles cannot be clearly indicated.) Further, the six bodies are not all alike; they each contain three smaller bodies—each of these being an ultimate physical atom—but in two of them the three atoms are arranged in a line, while in the remaining four they are arranged in a triangle… […]
The next substance investigated was oxygen, a far more complicated and puzzling body; the difficulties of observation were very much increased by the extraordinary activity shown by this element and the dazzling brilliancy of some of its constituents. The gaseous atom is an ovoid body, within which a spirally-coiled snake-like body revolves at a high velocity, five brilliant points of light shining on the coils. The snake appears to be a solid rounded body, but on raising the atom to E 4 the snake splits lengthwise into two waved bodies, and it is seen that the appearance of solidity is due to the fact that these spin round a common axis in opposite directions, and so present a continuous surface, as a ring of fire can be made by whirling a lighted stick. The brilliant bodies seen in the atom are on the crests of the waves in the positive snake, and in the hollows in the negative one; the snake itself consists of small bead-like bodies, eleven of which interpose between the larger brilliant spots. On raising these bodies to E 3 the snakes break up, each bright spot carrying with it six beads on one side and five on the other; these twist and writhe about still with the same extraordinary activity, reminding one of fire-flies stimulated to wild gyrations. It can been seen that the larger brilliant bodies each enclose seven ultimate atoms, while the beads each enclose two. (Each bright spot with its eleven beads is enclosed in a wall, accidentally omitted in the diagram.) On the next stage, E 2, the fragments of the snakes break up into their constituent parts; the positive and negative bodies, marked d and d’, showing a difference of arrangement of the atoms contained in them. These again finally disintegrate, setting free the ultimate physical atoms, identical with those obtained from hydrogen. The number of ultimate atoms contained in the gaseous atom of oxygen is 290, made up as follows:—
2 in each bead, of which there are 110:
7 in each bright spot, of which there are 10;
2 x 110 + 70 = 290.
When the observers had worked out this, they compared it with the number of ultimate atoms in hydrogen:—
290 / 18 = 16.11 +
The respective number of ultimate atoms contained in a chemical atom of these two bodies are thus seen to closely correspond with their accepted weight-numbers.
Almost every anti-Freudian I have found thinks every word written by Freud must be either true or a clear demonstration of his sham.
As a non-Psychoanalyst and a scientist I can tell you that an enormous part of our search for knowledge of ourselves as people and a culture is lost when we limit our endeavour to simple, repeatable experiments in simple laboratory conditions.
You don’t like, just as Freud eventually didn’t, the first attempts of Freud to envision a model of the mind. But somebody has to look beyond Conductism and develop a good model of our most important asset (our minds).
It is naive to expect a model of our minds to just pop up so we can then verify it with simple lab experiments. And it is naive to think that because Freud’s model of the mind completely lacks a guide to double-blind, repeatable experiments we should forever stay away from the right search.
Scientific exploration should not shy away from the hard work of searching for the right answer just because some Freud or another did not, like Newton or Einstein did, find all the possible answers for the next several decades.
Re Prof. Villarreal’s comment: I wonder where, in my correspondence with Newsweek, he finds me saying that a viable model of the mind should “just pop up,” much less that “we should forever stay away from the right search.” This is crude straw-man stuff.
Quite a few Freudians have themselves appealed to psychological experiments as a source of validation. The very poor quality of such studies–exposed as such by Eysenck & Wilson, Erwin, and others–reflects the chief problem with psychoanalytic theory, namely, a complete absence of concern for alternative (and less counterintuitive) explanations.
Regarding O’Reilly – “A rich white guy aligned with the ruling party who has the guts to stand up to the élitists.”
Huh? Did you read the same New Yorker article that I did? You know, the one you linked to, and gave the above teaser quote?
In “The New Yorker” article O’Reilly is rightly depicted as an unbalanced bully. Where do you get the part about standing up to elitists? O’Reilly is popular with the white male crowd because he reinforces their fears and supports their shallow worldview. He doesn’t stand up to elitists. He is an elitist.
The moslem world has consistently shown lack of manners, brutish conduct, a tendency to murderous behavior and “we” have shown understanding, patience or just a utter lack of concern for the people under their bigotted, backward regimes. Under the guise of non-involvement the western world has ignored the plight of many millions of humans suffering because Mohamad wanted it that way. Now the western world is paying its dues, the Moslems have arrived in droves demanding respect for a religion that has no respect for its own members. The western world is coming to terms with the menace, albeit slowly. The US president George Bush (The son) repeatedly declared that the wars in Afganistan and then Irak were against terrorism, it is in fact waged against Islam. May it be a success. Amen!
We talk rather too much about rights and respect (not that I’m against them, but different people have different ideas. Surely the simple fact is that everyone has to accept some responsibility for the consequences of their actions. And if they can’t foresee the consequences, then perhaps they should have been more careful what they said, did, whatever.
Moreover, this applies as much to those who take unreasonable offence as to those who give it, whether unintentionally or not.
I see now that the O’Reilley article by Nicholas Lehman contained a direct reference to the rich white guy syndrome – the guy who regards himself as a little guy doing battle against the elitists. Lehman diplomatically depicts O’Reilley as “beyond irony”, which is perhaps another way of saying “shallow and humorless.”
I am reminded of the recent commercial where a rugged CEO is explaining to his young assistant that he is now “sticking it to the man” with his new cell phone plan. To which the assistant replies, “but… you are the man. So …. isn’t that like sticking it to yourself?” “Maybe,” replies the CEO. O’Reilley the maverick!
Actually what stuck with me from my (first) reading of the article is the sense of self-pity which permeates O’Reilley’s stance to the world. He sees himself as victimized by mainstream media and does indeed see himself as representing the little guy – a sort of adolescent approach to the world, with no self perspective and no sense of humor. The reason Keith Olberman is able to go after him so effectively is precisely because Olberman refuses to take himself so seriously.
Let me try to clarify my point: while I have seen in my everyday life a lot of psychological research results being used in everything from job interviews to treatment of phobias, with terrible results, I have seen in Psychoanalysts I know a true willingness to understand the process beneath the visible expression of somebody’s conduct.
It is clear to me that many Psychoanalysts are truly trying to understand the human mind without reading Freud, Jung, Klein or others as gospel, while almost every psychologist I know is giving or taking away job opportunities based on family structure, speed for simple arithmetic problems and other oversimplified views of us as humans.
It has also been painfully clear to me that far too much importance is given by some psychologists to poorly understood statistical analysis: I have even participated in studies where literally thousands of combinations of variables were put through tens of statistical tests in an attempt to let the computer do the understanding and avoid the pesky “cause and effect” relationships.
I also know that psychoanalysts are aware that their discipline urgently needs scientific validation and that there is a true concern that their diagnosis always might be accurate or just a figment of the analyst’s imagination.
I am not interested in contradicting or refuting your article in Newsweek, and my comments were not directed towards that goal. I am sorry if I gave that impression. I would just like to see in psychologists a greater acknowledgement of the enormous feat of understanding the human mind, and the risks involved in pretending that we are ready to understand it through statistical analysis of current psychological tests.
There is a very good and well-attended course at Michigan State University taught by a psychologist-psychoanalyst (Bertram Karon, Ph.D.; “Personality-Psychoanalytic Perspectives”) that takes Freud’s central ideas (dynamic unconscious processes)seriously.
Re James Jones’s citing of Bertram Karon, from a preliminary Googling I found the following article by him on schizophrenia:
http://www.mpcpsa.org/dp.php?id=8
Of course considering only this one paper can lead one in a variety of directions, and I acknowledge that the one I’m focusing on here is scarcely relevant to the point James is making. But I think it does have some importance, in that it shows that people are still being misled by Freud’s writings about his clinical experiences (and that the psychoanalytic world is frequently oblivious to the critical research on Freud). Karon writes:
“Freud, referring specifically to conversion hysterics, reported that the incest memories they related in psychoanalysis were revealed more often to be fantasies than real events, although in many cases, according to Freud, they were undoubtedly real (Freud, 1917, p.370).”
But were the bulk of “incest memories” alluded to here either patients’ phantasies or memories – or were they actually Freud’s own *analytic reconstructions* of unconscious ideas that he misleadingly presented as if they emanated from the patients? With regard to the patients of the “seduction theory” period to which Freud frequently referred back in his writings about incest it is very evident that the latter is the case, as I’ve argued on several occasions, including here on Butterflies and Wheels:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=10
(For the full argument with documentation see the references to my articles at the end.)
I have examined in detail the specific reference given by Karon (above) to show how Freud misled his readers in his general expositions on the incest issue as well as in his retrospective accounts of the seduction theory. See:
http://human-nature.com/esterson/phantasy.html
I haven’t time at this moment to look more closely at Karon’s article, but it is unfortunate that he is still citing this material from Freud as if it is unproblematic.
Isn’t this essentially the same Vedic authoritarianism that Shakyamuni Buddha addressed 2500 years ago? It looks like there are some, both then and now, that haven’t gotten the message.
Re James Jones’ reporting that “there is a very good and well-attended course at Michigan State University taught by a psychologist-psychoanalyst (Bertram Karon, Ph.D.; Personality-Psychoanalytic Perspectives’) that takes Freud’s central ideas (dynamic unconscious processes) seriously”:
For anyone who’s interested (and I don’t suppose many are following this particular topic with baited breath) I’ve now skimmed through Karon’s article on schizophrenia that I previously cited, and I can’t say I’m impressed. In fact quite the reverse. For starters there’s the usual kind of psychoanalytic reporting style that has one wondering just how much is coming from the patient and how much is the interpretation of the analyst. With Karon’s contending that apparently irrational utterances of schizophrenics have meanings that can be deciphered by psychoanalytic interpretation we are in the territory of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (whom he cites and of whom I know little). I can’t say from my brief searches on Karon how he conducts his psychotherapy sessions, though I’m unimpressed by the kind of theoretical ideas he alludes to in the aforementioned article. To take the more straightforward examples, e.g., he writes that “hallucinations are entirely understandable by Freud’s (1900, 1917, 1933) theories of dreams, with a few additions”. And again: “As is widely cited, Freud derived many paranoid delusions from the fear of homosexuality…”, following which he cites favourably Freud’s rather absurd 1915 paper purportedly demonstrating that his theory that paranoia derives from the repression of homosexual feelings can be shown to be valid even when on the surface the case in question seems to be inconsistent with it. Yes, as James writes, Karon takes Freud’s central ideas seriously – but should we take Karon seriously when he does so?
Karon’s claims that better therapeutic results with schizophrenics have been obtained with psychoanalytic psychotherapy than with drug treatments, but I remain skeptical. Much of the evidence he supplies here is anecdotal. The one study he cites fails to include a control group that undergoes an equivalent amount of *non-psychoanalytic* psychotherapy so that it can be seen whether the psychoanalytic elements in the therapy are significant, rather than just the fact that attention and sympathy is given to the patient by a concerned individual over an extended period of time.
As a feminist and an experimental psychologist, I am often asked what I think of Freud. My answer is that although Freud undoubtedly wrote a great deal of nonsense about women, he was a genius whose theories of the unconscious were a huge step forward in understanding human motivation. If nothing else, women owe him a great deal for definitely putting to rest the notion that they should be punished for preying on men as succubi. I found the Newsweek articles as well done as such superficial treatment can be and agree with a subsequent letter to the editor saying that “No one castigates Henry Ford because his Model-T’s don’t run in the Indy 500 today. Freud’s brilliant prototypes opened up vast horizons for centuries of exploration.” Having discovered this site (butterfliesandwheels) only yesterday, I was interested to read Frederick Crews’s commentary but unfortunately, I was not impressed. The one point I agree with him about is that in Canada at least, I doubt that any psychology department is treating Freudianism as anything other than a historical curiosity. That appears to be the case for two reasons: 1) “pure” Freud has not been fashionable since the 1950s, though there have been signs that this may be changing following recent interest by neuroscientists; and 2) Freud’s influence is omnipresent in the teaching of psychology in an indirect manner, mediated through his many disciples; for example cognitive behavioral therapy, which is currently widely taught and very popular, is inconceivable without Freud. For Crews’ view about the lack of scientific validation of Freud’s ideas, I refer you to the comments by Andres Villarreal, in which I fully concur. As for Crews’ argument that Freud was not the first to speak of “the irrational” and of sexuality, I refer him to Thomas Kuhn, who pointed out that most great advances in science are made on the basis of already-available evidence, which is why several thinkers often have similar ideas to that of the person who is credited with an invention. Of course, Freud had the advantage of being much more creative and more articulate than Krafft-Ebing et al. Finally, Crews makes much of the aliquis controversy, in which Freud is alleged to have attributed to an acquaintance a chain of free association that was actually his own. Assuming this to be true, I say “Big Deal!” This trivial transposition did not harm anyone and was allegedly done to protect the privacy of Freud’s sister-in-law. It is certainly not serious enough to support Crews’ conclusion that this demonstrates that Freud was “unscrupulous” and “a charlatan.” Since Crews has clearly tried hard to find evidence to debunk Freud’s reputation, it is amazing that this insignificant anecdote is the worst he could find.
Frederick Crews can, of course, speak very eloquently for himself, but in the meantime I’ll take up a few of the points made by Louise.
She writes:
>Freud’s influence is omnipresent in the teaching of psychology in an indirect manner, mediated through his many disciples; for example cognitive behavioral therapy, which is currently widely taught and very popular, is inconceivable without Freud.< Rather than CBT being inconceivable without Freud (which is certainly false, as its basic notions do not in any way derive from Freud), a strong case could be made that it (or something similar) might well have been developed earlier without the all-pervading influence of Freud in psychotherapeutic circles. Possibly Louise is under the widely-held misconception that psychotherapy started with Freud, when in fact Benedikt, Féré and Janet in Europe were all practising one-to-one psychotherapy before Freud, and psychotherapy was practised in the United States prior to the visit by Freud in 1909 that ignited interest in his ideas there. >As for Crews’ argument that Freud was not the first to speak of ‘the irrational’ and of sexuality, I refer him to Thomas Kuhn, who pointed out that most great advances in science are made on the basis of already-available evidence, which is why several thinkers often have similar ideas to that of the person who is credited with an invention.< That presupposes that what Freud wrote on these topics was actually an advance, whereas he frequently took pre-Freudian insights and extended them into his own overarching conceptual schema or far-fetched scenarios that his critics consider to be unsubstantiated (and, in the case of sexuality, not infrequently absurd). On the subject of the invention of the “aliquis” encounter, Louise writes:
>Assuming this to be true, I say ‘Big Deal!’ This trivial transposition did not harm anyone and was allegedly done to protect the privacy of Freud’s sister-in-law. It is certainly not serious enough to support Crews’ conclusion that this demonstrates that Freud was ‘unscrupulous’ and ‘a charlatan.’ Since Crews has clearly tried hard to find evidence to debunk Freud’s reputation, it is amazing that this insignificant anecdote is the worst he could find.< Louise fails to appreciate that Crews referred to this episode because it was raised in the “Newsweek” article. Crews himself noted: “The people who mention it most often are Freudians, who cite it as an absurdity that typifies the thinking of all ‘Freud bashers’.” On Louis’s general point here, if this were an isolated instance one might accept it is of no great significance. However, Freud deceitfully invented an individual and dialogue on at least one other occasion, and grossly misrepresented episodes in the early period of psychoanalysis, and his clinical experiences, on several occasions. Crews really has no problem in providing evidence for more serious transgressions. Louise quotes a letter writer to “Newsweek”
>”Freud’s brilliant prototypes opened up vast horizons for centuries of exploration”< Leaving aside the absurd hyperbole here, it would be much closer to the truth to say his conceptual schema were frequently blind alleys, and (especially in the States) for a long period his influence effectively inhibited areas of research (such as non-psychoanalytic dream research) and advances in psychiatric practice. >My answer is that although Freud undoubtedly wrote a great deal of nonsense about women…< He also wrote a great deal of nonsense about men.
I have a question not addressed in the likes of the DSM-IV… Evidense shows that Freud’s adding the mystique of the “un-conscious mind” sealed the deal making psycho-therapy the only and obvious option to “mental illness”… My question is, if the human mind is responsible for processing thought, when was the last time your unconscious mind had an unconscious thought??? Corrolary: …and how did you know???
Rod
Concerning Meera Nanda’s article on traditional Indian medicine, Meera sensibly describes the problems with it, but then suggests that there may be something to it after all because it has stood the test of time. Well…astrology, Christianity, and witchcraft have been around for quite a while too–Is it possible that these beliefs and practices are not as irrational and false as I had thought?
Louise:
Freudianism may be little more than a historical curiousity in psych depts generally, but there are still serious question marks over its influence on psychotherapeutic practise.
My own beef is the idea that morality is rooted in the ‘castration complex.’ Fear of losing the penis, albeit unconscious, is the supposed basis for the adult conscience: the so-called ‘superego.’ Because girls have nothing to lose – literally! – they do not develop the same trenchant morality af men.
The idea that women are psychosexually ‘programmed’ to be morally inferior has historically raised quite a few hackles. And not just among feminists. The ‘superego’ is a mytho-poeic construct, an attempt to account for morality exclusively in terms of consequence. For Freudians, only the law can logically guarantee
socialised behaviour.
Freud, in my view, failed to grasp the conceptual distinction between ‘conscience’and ‘consequence’. The latter maybe accounted for in terms of the superego – if you limit it to men. But the former is a function of both empathy and imagination: it cannot be understood in a psychosexual theory that reduces all human behaviour to sex and aggression.
Louise:
Thank you for your note. Whether many things Freud wrote are right or wrong, I think it is our mission to try and grasp his whole vision of the mind and improve or change it, instead of fighting around the fact that his theories seem, at first, counter-intuitive.
Many want to find the unconscious part of the mind, preferably in an exact spot in the brain, and expect to understand and see that unconscious thought in a tangible way before accepting the possibility that something might be right in this model of the mind. If we translate that to other fields of science, it is like wanting to see an electron before accepting the possibility of its existance. In fact, electrons were studied and models of its behaviour were created before it was undeniably proven to exist.
If we had clearly better models, Freud would already be side by side with Ptholomey, in the waste bin of Science.
As to Edmund Standing’s piece. It’s clever and maybe accurate and is written ( I assume) to demonstrate that we in the west are just as bad as anyone else…the equivalency rif…the Koran isn’t all that bad…just look at our Bible…it says the same awful things! You know the Bush = bin Ladin business.
Only one small issue: western foreign policy is not based on a moral superiority derived from the Bible. (Right now it’s based on pure stupidity with little basis whatsoever.) At one time it may have been and was Bible-based — but then is then and now is now.
Anyway, I was surprised to see such a snobby little piece here on B&W.
Btw, these letters are very well-hidden and seem to be only accessible via an article. You might receivemore comments if people could see that there was commentary.
Another aide. I visit this site because of Ophelia’s and readers comments, not links to articles. I’d be more interested than not in why you choose an article…what you think is important, significant etc etc
RTD’s comment:
Have to agree. Standing ignores an essential fact: that church and state are separate in the West.
It also assumes that all who call themselves Christian are literal-minded half-wits. Some are, but most are no more driven to bloodthirstiness by the Bible than readers of history are: they know they’d find themselves behind bars pronto.
I see that Frederick Crews doesn’t even mention homosexuality in his list of the ’embarrassments’ of psychoanalytic theory in his latest article. Gee, I wonder why not.
Seriously, I think we should know perfectly well why not. What a laugh. Forgive my sneering, but when enough time passes for people to consider the reasons behind the decline of psychoanalysis objectively, Crews’s comments on the homosexual issue will produce a permanent and extremely unattractive stain on his reputation.
Those interested may note that Offing Culture in Out of My System is another of Crews’s articles where homosexuals get mentioned in the same breath as psychotics – although there, unlike in Analysis Terminable, Crews at least indicates that
he considers psychosis worse even than homosexuality. Crews’s attitudes seem to have got more rancid as the 1970s wore on.
The last time Richard Warnotck was here I invited him to condemn New Zealanders on the ground that having viewed their rugby captain try to murder an opponent in a spear tackle, their failure to condemn this felony meant they saw nothing wrong with it. He declined this challenge, sensing that to accept it would involve either condemning all New Zealanders (people who have email addresses like rwarnotck@yahoo.co.nz) or thinking that to infer agreement from the absence of disagreement, or acceptance from lack of condemnation, is not always correct.
So I repeat my challenge: can he show any difference between the logic in saying that Crews’ failure to condemn anti-homosexual prejudice means Crews is anti-homosexual, and in saying that the failure of New Zealanders to condemn that spear tackle means they see nothing wrong with it?
RDC:
‘western foreign policy is not based on a moral superiority derived from the Bible’.
1. Current (and past) US policy regarding Israel has been greatly affected by the ideology of Christian Zionism espoused by millions of born-again Christians in America, and is/has been undoubtedly an influence on Bush and his circle.
2. Bush regularly cites his ‘faith’, quotes from the Bible and so on, to back up his positions. He believes his foreign policy IS influenced by a biblical worldview and by the God of the Bible.
See this article for example:
‘Faith Matters: George Bush and Providence’
http://www.publiceye.org/apocalyptic/bush-2003/austin-providence.html
The problem with Crews’s comments was not that they failed to condemn anti-homosexual prejudice: the problem was that they were expressions of anti-homosexual prejudice.
So I repeat my challenge: ask people who are not friends or admirerers of Frederick Crews what they think he meant. If you don’t know any such people, you need to get out more.
One more thought. Crews can’t claim to be a brave free-thinker and at the same time appeal to majority opinion when it suits him.
That Crews can conclude that Freud’s theories have no merit because, ‘for several decades now, the major journals of the field have completely ignored all psychoanalytic claims’, shows that he is an intellectual conformist, a follower of scientific herds.
Despite years of arguments over PC, it doesn’t seem to have occured to Crews that there might be reasons of politics or intellectual fashion behind the neglect of psychoanalysis. I can only assume that he is so deeply dominated by the current fashions that this is literally unimaginable to him.
It will eventually become clear, after decades of painful experience, that Crews’s approach is a disastrous mistake. It’s the other way around: rather than the rejection of psychoanalysis by western culture showing that there is something very wrong with psychoanalysis, it shows that there is something very wrong with western culture.
At a time when western culture is facing such severe threats from without, perhaps it is not surprising that people want to reject evidence that it is also rotting from within. If Freud’s theories on human nature have some essential truth to them, then their rejection would be the most decisive evidence that western culture is dying.
Richard Warnotck writes:
“The problem with Crews’s comments was not that they failed to condemn anti-homosexual prejudice: the problem was that they were expressions of anti-homosexual prejudice.”
I should remind him that the only evidence he adduced for this is a comment by Crews damning the distress caused to parents who were told they caused their children’s homosexuality. Indeed, on encountering a later comment by Crews that explicitly showed Crews is not anti-homosexual, Warnotck then claimed that this showed a change in Crews’ views.
And yet again he ducked my challenge. How brave of him. Can I deduce from his silence that he is a coward?
Crews’s complaint about parental guilt in Analysis Terminable is enough to show that his view of homosexuality was very negative at that time. It does not distinguish between suggesting that parents are responsible for their children becoming homosexual and suggesting that parents ought to feel guilty.
If you write as though those suggestions were one, it can only be because you think that guilt is an appropriate reaction to causing your child to become homosexual.
(The complaint was not even fully accurate, by the way, since analysts such as Edmund Bergler strongly denied that parents had any responsibility for their children becoming homosexual. See Bergler’s article on The Tragedy of Parents of Young Homosexuals in his 1959 book One Thousand Homosexuals).
That complaint wasn’t the only basis for my accusation. There was also Crews’s unfortunate statement, with its sneering and smugly self-congratulatory tone that he must have thought dreadfully smart at the time, ‘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).
Consider what ‘replaces’ means. It means to substitute something for something else. When one thing is substituted for another thing as a mental aberration, one thing has become a mental aberration and the other has ceased to be a mental aberration. If you object to something substituting for something else as a mental aberration, you are objecting to both parts of this process.
In this case, that means objecting to both the fact that homosexuality is no longer deemed a mental aberration and the fact that smoking is now deemed to be one. Which makes Crews’s much later complaint about how psychoanalysis deemed homosexuality a mental disorder revoltingly hypocritical.
The editors of the New York Review of Books, who presumably knew about his past statements on the issue, did Crews a major disservice by not politely telling him that he would make a fool of himself by complaining about homosexuality having been deemed a mental illness in ‘The Unknown Freud’.
GW Bush’s claim that his polices derive from his faith are as credible as his claim that Iraq was an immediate danger.
I have never gotten any sense that Bush was religious; he may claim to be but I simply don’t believe it. He is – oddly enough — totally secular and his ‘faith’ is of one who folloows a convenient and malleable voting bloc.
More importantly, one swallow does not make a summer and one President in the past 80 years hardly proves Standing’s point. That goes for US polciy on Israel; the evangelical support is quite recent and represents only one part of a vast foreign policy. How, for example, does religion effect American foreign policy with, say, Argentina?
No, Mr. Standing, you’ll have to dig a bit deeper.
Richard Warnotck writes “If you write as though those suggestions were one, it can only be because you think that guilt is an appropriate reaction to causing your child to become homosexual” .
No: the original problem is his conflation of two separate things: the notion that anti-homosexual prejudice is wrong and the notion that it is ok to punish anti-homosexual parents of homosexual children by lying to them by telling them they caused the homosexuality. Warnotck thinks it’s ok to punish such parents in this way and that to object to this punishment is itself anti-homosexual. Similarly one could say that to think it wrong to put Holocaust-denier David Irving in jail is to be a Holocaust denier, that objecting to the castration of rapists is the same as promoting rape, that to oppose the death penalty for murder is to think killing people is ok and so on.
Then there’s this: “There was also Crews’s unfortunate statement, with its sneering and smugly self-congratulatory tone that he must have thought dreadfully smart at the time, ‘Quite true: when smoking replaces homosexuality as a mental aberration, more of the credit must go to caucuses than to new findings'”. This mean Crews thinks that psychiatry has no better reason to consider smoking a mental aberration that it previously had for the same attitude to homosexuality.
It’s all obvious if you keep an open mind.
Perhaps Frederick Crews himself had better explain what he meant.
Forgive me for adding this, but the devotion of some people to Frederick Crews is starting to resemble the devotion of others to Jesus.
It’s the devotion to that long-exposed charlatan Freud that is the problem. A prime example being the soft of nonsense beng peddled by Richard Warnotck. (Mis-)Read all sorts of adsurdities into simple language, insist on hidden meanings where none exist, and then used your allegedly deep insights into the real mindset of the author as weapons against him: the master fraudster could not do it better.
If I were a literary critic under attack for something or other, I’d be a bit embarrassed to sit back and let illiterates defend me.
What a pity you are wasting your reader’s time with the economically ignorant views of Cornehls.
Ah, the good old ad hominem attack: it’s good to know I was having an effect.
BTW: since the quotations from Crews are decades old, and no one else has noticed his alleged homophobia, does this mean that everybody but Richard Warnotck is an “illiterate”?
The accusation of illiteracy is not an ad hominem insult. It is based on Power’s inability to understand what “replaces” means. No one may have commented on the homophobia of Crews’s comments before me, but probably many people have noticed it.
Anyone who finds it unbelievable that people would notice Crew’s homophobia but remain silent about it has no idea just how badly western culture has decayed over the last few decades – the same period during which, as Crews notes, the major psychology journals have ignored psychoanalytic claims.
The principle is the same: ignore whatever is embarrassing and doesn’t suit your agenda.
1)”The accusation of illiteracy is not an ad hominem insult”. Not always an insult, but without doubt an insult when used in this manner: “If I were a literary critic under attack for something or other, I’d be a bit embarrassed to sit back and let illiterates defend me”
2) “The principle is the same: ignore whatever is embarrassing and doesn’t suit your agenda”. Here Richard Warnotck describes a large part of his debating style – anyone for a spear-tackle?
3) “If you object to something substituting for something else as a mental aberration, you are objecting to both parts of this process. In this case, that means objecting to both the fact that homosexuality is no longer deemed a mental aberration and the fact that smoking is now deemed to be one.”
Suppose a country has 3 political parties and a general election replaces government of party A by party B. A television reporter does a “vox pop”, asking people what they think of the election result.
a) Supporters of party A say they are unhappy with the replacement: their case is described by Warnotck’s claim.
b) Supporters of party B say they are happy with the replacement: their case is also described by Warnotck’s claim.
c) Supporters of party C say they are unhappy because they wanted their party to win. This is impossible according to Warnotck: to be unhappy with a replacement one must have been happy with the status quo ante.
d) Anarchists say they are unahappy with the replacement because they want no government at all. Again, impossible according to Warnotck.
In Warnotck’s world,”a pox on both your houses” in illogical. Here ends my latest display of illiteracy.
Is this the best Paul Power can do at this stage? Irrelevant examples that have nothing to do with what Crews wrote?
Someone needs to teach Richard Warnotck how to philosophise. One of the basic techniques is to convert the particular into the general and see if the general makes sense. That’s why logic converts claims into forms like “If A is true then B is true. B is true. Therefore A is true”. By looking at the sort of thinking involved one sees that claims like these are invalid in general. It allows for counterexamples to be formed. “If Socrates is human then Socrates is mortal. Socrates is mortal. Therefore Socrates is human”. Now “Socrates is human ” could be true , but not if Socrates is a cat.
Amd that’s what I’ve done to Warnotck’s inane ramblings in dictionaryland regarding the meaning of “replace”. I have converted his particular claim to a general one and shown it to be nonsense. The idea that to be unhappy with a replacement implies one was happy with the status quo ante only makes sense if the two options – before and after – are mutually exclusive and have no third or other alternatives. Yet it is obvious that the two options in his particular example are not mutually exclusive. There are homosexual smokers who will not be happy with either their homosexuality or their smoking being described as a mental illness. And there are anti-homosexual anti-smokers who are not happy for different reasons.
At some point even Warnotck will have to give up on what we might call his “kiwi logic” and accept that it does not fly.
Hey Paul Power,
In the true analytic style you have managed to turn an argument about Freud into a nonsense exercise in which longwinded examples involving A’s and B’s are deployed to prove that language is a neutral substance that can only transmit bits of dehumanized information, that any attempt to pierce the surface of what is explicitly said to unearth the subjective position of the person doing the writing is sophistry, etc. I will indulge in what I believe is called “rank psychologizing” here: it is hard not to come to the conclusion that the impressive proliferation of logical refutations of Mr. Warnotck’s position (“rank philosophizing”, if you will) masks a certain degree of enjoyment at being able to run language into the ground, rob it of anything but its explicit meaning, and make it boring as hell, all in the name of “free thinking”. This myth of the “free thinker” is a rough one: having come to this website by chance, and not as a Free Thinker, I was struck by the degree to which most of the verbiage on display hews to a certain style, a certain feel. As far as I can tell, “free thinking” is the philosophical equivalent of Libertarianism: a way of saying nothing while saying something, an excuse to avoid confronting anything real.
…’masks a certain degree of enjoyment at being able to run language into the ground, rob it of anything but its explicit meaning…’
That’s the way us folks in here try to make sense.
But some ‘nonsense’ verse (libre?) from you wouldn’t go amiss….
Hi Fred Jones:
Richard Warnotck has commited a series of logical errors which I have been trying to demonstrate to him. Anyone is free to read anything into anything and speculate wildly, but they’d better have good evidence and error-free logic if they want to convert speculation into definite conclusions and utter slurs.
I will not let such bad behaviour go unchallenged. In this I am a Jonesist, a philosophy named after the much loved Corporal Jones of BBC TV program “Dad’s Army” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dad's_Army). He used to say, pointing to his bayonet: “They don’t like it up ’em!”.
Power writes, ‘The idea that to be unhappy with a replacement implies one was happy with the status quo ante only makes sense if the two options – before and after – are mutually exclusive and have no third or other alternatives.’ This is not true, however.
To be unhappy with a replacement obviously means that you were happy with the previous state of affairs if you write in a way which indicates that you consider the two options mutually exclusive, and that was how Crews wrote. Shall I quote him again? ”Quite true: when smoking replaces homosexuality as a mental aberration, more of the credit must go to caucuses than to new findings.”
What hint is there of a third opition or possibility in that sentence? None whatever. It is a perfectly straightforward sentence: it indicates that smoking has replaced (which means to substitute for, remember?) homosexuality as a mental aberration, and that Crews disapproves of this replacement.
I am quite sure that Crews understood that it is possible for someone to object to both homosexuality and smoking being deemed mental aberrations. I also understand this possibility. The fact that the possibility existed does not mean that Crews did this.
Richard Warnotck is now admitting his claim is invalid.
If, as he now claims, it is possible to object to homosexuality being deemed a mental illness and to object to smoking being deemed a mental illness, then why is Crews not allowed this possibility?
Here, for the benefit of Warnotck , is his original quote from Crews:
“‘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).” It is obvious that Crews is attacking the modus operandi of the compilers of the third DSM because they made scientific decisions based on politics. Such a critic will clearly want other possibilities: such as a DSM that mentions neither homosexuality nor smoking as meantal aberrations and whose contents are decided solely by looking at the science and the evidence underpinning it.
After his original cite of the above quotation, Warnotck wrote: “Only someone convinced both that smoking is not a ‘mental aberration’ and that homosexuality is one would say that”.
Apparently the possibility of homosexual smokers never occurred to him.
“If, as he now claims, it is possible to object to homosexuality being deemed a mental illness and to object to smoking being deemed a mental illness, then why is Crews not allowed this possibility?”
Because what Crews wrote shows that he chose not to take it.
Can Warnotck explain why the full quotation in question could not been written by a homosexual smoker?
Warnotck wrote:
“To be unhappy with a replacement obviously means that you were happy with the previous state of affairs if you write in a way which indicates that you consider the two options mutually exclusive, and that was how Crews wrote. Shall I quote him again? ‘Quite true: when smoking replaces homosexuality as a mental aberration, more of the credit must go to caucuses than to new findings.’
The Crews quote does not do what Warnotck claims. I’d like to see him try to prove his claim.
Somewhere down the line, this discussion became the gay bashers against the bashers of gay bashers against the bashers of gay bashers bashing.
In the absence of better scientific knowledge, I consider that all questions about homosexuality are better left to be solved case-by-case between patients and health care profesionals.
Most of what we are seeing in these days is power politics where big trophies are at stake, like child adoption, paternal rights, inheritance and so on. Mental aberration, DNS are catch words for a political fight, not for a scientific debate. No one would make a fuss if consumption, high fever or evil eye were listed in the DNS, they would just laugh at any doctor that diagnosed them.
I did prove my claim, but that’s enough of this “Yes it is! No it isn’t!” exchange for now.
When I was 21, I went through the phonebook to find someone who taught transcendental meditation (TM), thinking it might assist with, well, handling life a bit better.
I found a guru (and I use that term with great irony), and attended 1 month or so of group sessions, during which we were taught the basics of TM (small tricks and techniques to settle the mind). Toward Christmas, our tutor invited us to come back the next year for a weekend course on something called ayurveda.
By that point in time I’d consulted dozens of doctors, nutritionists, Chinese medicinists, naturopaths, and every other conceivable therapist who might be able to help me with what’s come to be known as “irritable bowel syndrome”.
GPs gave me large and useless doses of senna, naturopaths gave me tinctures which I mostly vomited straight back up, acupuncturists charged me a lot of money for no appreciable results, but they all told me one thing: there’s no “cure” for IBS, all you can do is manage the symptoms.
One week after making some slight diet and lifestyle changes in line with the ayurvedic stuff, I went through a day of great intestinal distress. I thought I was going to pass my entire bowel!
From that day forward, and for the last 12 years, I have had no trouble at all with gas, constipation, abdominal pain, nausea, or any of the other lovely symptoms which characterise IBS. I enjoy absolute bowel regularity.
Now, exaggeration is the bane of holistic therapy, but I can’t classify my experience as anything short of a miracle. Ayurveda has improved my life in other ways, but that was the most striking, and the one example I cite when explaining my reasons for living my life in the context of what my partner once called “preposterous, tree-hugging hippy crap”.
Note that a whole year had passed since my “conversion” before I picked up a Deepak Chopra book and discovered, to my lasting horror, that this charlatan is the poster boy for ayurveda. Good lord. It’s like having a statue of Dr Phil outside all public hospitals.
What I found disappointing about this article is that it assumes ayurveda operates by the same principle as conventional medicine: blasting cells with substances to force an effect. It doesn’t.
The nature of ayurveda is participatory, and requires the practitioner to understand the system and themselves. “Magic bullet” cures don’t come into it.
In my understanding and practice of ayurveda, the idea of taking pills as an adjunct to lifestyle changes seems unnecessary, if not absurd.
I have no interest in faith healing. I would like to see ayurveda tested rigorously to determine what, if any, true effect it has.
However, going by the style of this article, I fear it would be conducted as a reductive process of feeding sample groups the various pills and potions labeled “ayurvedic”, then waiting to see if their cancer or diabetes cleared up.
That would be like testing the effect of regular exercise on obesity by getting an obese sample group to sit around eating protein and vitamin supplements without actually exercising.
I suspect that Swami Ramdev is a good, old-fashioned snake-oil salesman, whose commitment to ayurveda is based more on a taste for limousines and lavish houses than the promotion of a health paradigm which I believe to have great, untapped, potential.
The author’s criticism is justified, but I ask readers to consider ayurveda on its broad spectrum of application, not just the efforts of one businessman to sell powdered body parts as a cure-all.
Richard “I’m no illiterate but you are” Warnotck does not even know the difference between assertion and proof.
Where is the proof that only homophobes could write the Crews’ quotation?
Its a pretty good researched article. However, I wd like to add that if one wants to understand the dynamics and the “way it works” of Ayurveda or Pranayam or Yoga just within the parameters of modern science and technology, then its not going to be easy. Many things can definitely be understood. And many things cannot be understood. Simply, because the modern science doesn’t have the know-how or technology to decipher a great deal of dynamics of mental working and consciousness. Science has hardly understood what exactly is consciousness. Quantum physics is still trying to peep into these domains. Whereas the Indian “science” like Ayurveda, Yoga and Tantra etc have detailed and almost complete explanations of all the layers and dynamics of consciousness. But modern science is faltering here as they try to understand the thing which is trying to understand !!!!!
A concrete example is the book “Occult Chemistry” by Dr. Annie Besant & Leadbeater published years before Rutherford’s Gold leaf experiemnt which proved that atom can be broken. But “Occult Chemistry” had detailed elaborations of not only sub-atomic particles but even quarks and sub-quarks !! And for this they had used the “anima siddhi” technology of Yoga !! And their pre-Rutherford findings have been proved in a research in the University of california by Dr. Stephens Phillips.
Actually, Yoga ( the complete 8-fold yoga, not just physical exercises) is the technology used by ancient Indians where human consciousness itself becomes the instrument to acquire the analytical and synthetical knowledge of all subjects. The ancient Indian knew that on the levels of consciouness the entire cosmos in inter-related and actually a single WHOLE. Even the Bell’s Theorum says that at sub-atomic level the cosmos appears to be inter-related and a single body !! The traditional modern science has been based on the assumption (still taught is schools and colleges) that the material world,as wee see it, it REAL. But, the advances in quantum-physics itself has shattered this assumption !!!
Thus, it is perhaps impossible to explain Ayurveda under the parameters of the “modern science” as this “modern science” doesn’t have adequate understanding of how nature exists and works.
However, there is need to put a stop on quacks and fake people who are tarnishing the image of Ayurveda.
These quacks are in Allopathy also. But there is no hue and cry made against them by “intelelctuals” whose knowledge is chained and conditioned under the “western modern science”.
To put Ramdev baba in quack’s category and to unquestionably accept the samples given “herself” by Vrinda Karat ( who is a known communist with anti-spirituality appraoch) is crossing the limits of a rational debate.
-Yashendra, Mumbai
Yashendra Prasad writes “The traditional modern science has been based on the assumption (still taught is schools and colleges) that the material world,as wee see it, it REAL. But, the advances in quantum-physics itself has shattered this assumption !!! ” This is beyond nonsense. If it is saying that Quantum Mechanics shows reality not to exist, it is plain wrong. If it is saying that Quantum Mechanics (QM) required us to revise our thinking on the nature of the physical universe, then QM is just another in a long line of discoveries we in the West have taken in our stride: the microscope, the telescope, relativity, and evolution, to name but a few, have all overthrown long-standing notions and led to huge advances in our knowledge (and consequent ability to control the nasty effects of nature, such as disease).
Whereas India, blessed with all its superior knowledge, is a beacon of enlightenment, with a caste system, animal worship and the murder of babies on the grounds that the child is of the wrong sex, to name but a few of its more advanced practices.
Yashendra Prasad writes that in their “Occult Chemistry” Besant and Leadbetter reported their pre-Rutherford findings that have been proved in a research in the University of California by Dr. Stephens Phillips.
Here are some of those findings obtained by the “astral vision” methodology of Besant and Leadbetter
http://www.anandgholap.net/AB_CWL_Occult_Chemistry.htm#chap2
The first chemical atom selected for this examination was an atom of hydrogen (H). On looking carefully at it, it was seen to consist of six small bodies, contained in an egg-like form. It rotated with great rapidity on its own axis, vibrating at the same time, and the internal bodies performed similar gyrations. The whole atom spins and quivers, and has to be steadied before exact observation is possible. The six little bodies are arranged in two sets of three, forming two triangles that are not interchangeable, but are related to each other as object and image. (The lines in the diagram of it on the gaseous sub-plane are not lines of force, but show the two triangles; on a plane surface the interpenetration of the triangles cannot be clearly indicated.) Further, the six bodies are not all alike; they each contain three smaller bodies—each of these being an ultimate physical atom—but in two of them the three atoms are arranged in a line, while in the remaining four they are arranged in a triangle… […]
The next substance investigated was oxygen, a far more complicated and puzzling body; the difficulties of observation were very much increased by the extraordinary activity shown by this element and the dazzling brilliancy of some of its constituents. The gaseous atom is an ovoid body, within which a spirally-coiled snake-like body revolves at a high velocity, five brilliant points of light shining on the coils. The snake appears to be a solid rounded body, but on raising the atom to E 4 the snake splits lengthwise into two waved bodies, and it is seen that the appearance of solidity is due to the fact that these spin round a common axis in opposite directions, and so present a continuous surface, as a ring of fire can be made by whirling a lighted stick. The brilliant bodies seen in the atom are on the crests of the waves in the positive snake, and in the hollows in the negative one; the snake itself consists of small bead-like bodies, eleven of which interpose between the larger brilliant spots. On raising these bodies to E 3 the snakes break up, each bright spot carrying with it six beads on one side and five on the other; these twist and writhe about still with the same extraordinary activity, reminding one of fire-flies stimulated to wild gyrations. It can been seen that the larger brilliant bodies each enclose seven ultimate atoms, while the beads each enclose two. (Each bright spot with its eleven beads is enclosed in a wall, accidentally omitted in the diagram.) On the next stage, E 2, the fragments of the snakes break up into their constituent parts; the positive and negative bodies, marked d and d’, showing a difference of arrangement of the atoms contained in them. These again finally disintegrate, setting free the ultimate physical atoms, identical with those obtained from hydrogen. The number of ultimate atoms contained in the gaseous atom of oxygen is 290, made up as follows:—
2 in each bead, of which there are 110:
7 in each bright spot, of which there are 10;
2 x 110 + 70 = 290.
When the observers had worked out this, they compared it with the number of ultimate atoms in hydrogen:—
290 / 18 = 16.11 +
The respective number of ultimate atoms contained in a chemical atom of these two bodies are thus seen to closely correspond with their accepted weight-numbers.