Resistance is confirmation
I’m reading Frederick Crews’s Freud, and plan to share observations from it over the coming weeks. Laura Miller reviews it in Slate.
Crews goes gunning for two distinct Freuds: the doctor/scientist and the man. The former, as Crews acknowledges, has suffered a steep fall in reputation over the past 45 years. The biological model on which psychoanalysis was based has been superseded by newer discoveries, particularly in neurochemistry. Freud published the works that would establish his reputation as a savant of humanity’s unacknowledged inner life in the early 1900s; over the subsequent century, it has become ever harder to ignore the lack of empirical evidence for the effectiveness of psychoanalysis as a therapy. Our growing understanding of the complexity of consciousness and the dizzying variety of human experience makes Freud’s rigidly universal model of the unconscious and its drives—from the Oedipus complex to penis envy—seem laughable, blinkered by his background as a patriarchal, bourgeois 19th-century Viennese.
With emphasis on the 19th century part, because there’s so much psychology and brain science for the non-specialist reader available now that it makes Freud’s stories seem like a parlor game.
But to Crews’ annoyance, these erosions haven’t done enough to wear down Freud’s reputation as a bold, original thinker who revolutionized our understanding of the human mind. He knows that nearly all his readers, “believing that Freud, whatever his failings, initiated our tradition of empathetic psychotherapy,” will “judge this book to have unjustly withheld credit for his most benign and enduring achievement.” But Crews will have none of that. Instead, he aims to prove that Freud not only had “predecessors and rivals in one-on-one mental treatment” but that he also “failed to match their standard of responsiveness to each patient’s unique situation.”
He was an egomaniac. That’s what jumps off the pages for me: Freud’s relentless, Trump-level self-obsession.
Without a doubt, Freud was a terrible doctor. Anyone who reads his case histories or has more than a passing familiarity with the real events on which they were based can only pity those individuals unfortunate enough to come under his “care.” As Crews painstakingly documents, using Freud’s own letters and clinical notes (many of which were, until recently, published only in bowdlerized form by his acolytes), Freud disliked medicine, was revolted by sick people, and held his patients in contempt. “I could throttle every one of them,” he once told a shocked colleague. Although he often claimed to have cured people of hysteria, neuroses, or other ailments, those claims were almost entirely false. He helped very few—quite possibly none—of his patients, and spectacularly harmed several.
Apart from that, he was awesome.
Crews’ Freud is first and foremost dishonest, misrepresenting his past, his data (when he bothered to collect it), his results, his patient’s life stories, the contributions to his theories by friends and colleagues. Animated by “a temperament and self-conception” that “demanded that he achieve fame at any cost,” Freud concocted theories about the human psyche based on his own idiosyncratic past and personality and attempted to force his patients to corroborate them. He pressed them to confirm the often preposterous suppressed “memories” he claimed to have deduced from their symptoms and, when they stood firm, interpreted their very resistance as confirmation.
Notice anything about that? That’s right: it’s unfalsifiable! If patients accept his theories, good, and if they reject them, even better. Freud is either right, or righter. It saves trouble all around.
Popper even uses Freud (and Adler) as examples of non-falsifiable theories, that can explain everything and therefore explain nothing. (See “Conjectures and Refutations”, 1953. Yes, that long ago.)
I’m reading the same book. As I said on Facebook yesterday, joking-not really joking, Freud was L. Ron Hubbard for intellectuals. Both were ambitious egotists; both understood that people love compelling stories that seem to make sense of their sufferings and failures, and stories that promise esoteric knowledge that will make them happy and successful. Both pretended they had made people better when they did no such thing. Both lied. Like Elron, Freud created a phony biography. (To be fair, Elron made shit up out of whole cloth; Freud, who really was a doctor, after all, if not a good one, just exaggerated the achievements of his pre-psychoanalysis days.)
And like Elron, followers promoted the legend and kept all the evidence that contradicted it out of the public eye for years and years.
Steve, indeed, I first learned that via Popper years ago. I kind of remember the lightbulb going on.
Lady M – I think Elron consciously used some of Freud’s bullshittery techniques, no?
A quick google scan seems to confirm.
I had heard many years ago about Freud’s “Seduction Theory” which alleged that Freud started out believing that his patients were victims of sexual abuse, but when this was too controversial he switched to a theory that his patients had fantasized those assaults. Apparently, this was put forward in a book The Freudian Cover-up by Florence Rush.
That book has apparently been criticized for mistaking Freud’s infliction of a type of “false recovered memory” syndrome” on his patients for reliable patient accounts of abuse. That seems to be Crews’ position, though I could only guess that based on a few oblique comments by Miller.
I wish Miller had spent more time on the history of Freud criticism than in drawing tenuous parallels with something David Foster Wallace wrote about John Updike 20 years ago, but that’s Slate for you.
@Latvian Diplomat
I found it apt, and synchronistic, since Kate Millett died this morning. Wallace challenged the profoundly sexist male literary narcissists who were widely considered the best writers in the U.S.–Millett had challenged some of the same ones in Sexual Politics. They all took Freudianism (and its view of sexuality) very, very seriously, and it informed their worldviews (and hence their work). That’s the thing: Freud’s theories were incredibly influential and had wide-ranging effects. He and his acolytes and the artists and others he influenced helped shape the 20th century.
(Wallace, a serious writer himself, took risks in attacking those literary icons, and of course a Freudian would see his attack as–well, as Freudian. Oedipus killing his father, you know.)
(Then there’s this:
)
Some years ago, I decided to get educated and started doing an MA course in theatre studies at a British acting school. The course was not very good, and I finally decided not to waste my time. Freud of course (along with Lacan) was a constant reference by one pedagogue at least, and the assumption was that since he had been so influential, everybody born and brought up subsequent to the triumph of Freudianism was necessarily controlled by Freudian thinking, even though they were not consciously aware of it. What if you disagreed with Freud’s theories, I asked? (I had tried to read Freud, had found what I read singularly unenlightening, singularly philistine, and singularly tendentious and useless where the interpretation of literary or dramatic works were concerned – as well as where music and the visual arts were concerned: the fruits of Freud were a reductive and knowing banality that expressed more than anything the practitioner’s self-satisfaction and sense of superiority to what s/he was supposedly interpreting.) My question was naturally deemed unworthy of a proper response, because OF COURSE Freud was now a part of that determining system, our Kultur, and even if you disagreed profoundly and reasonably with his ideas you were still perversely parroting them – you couldn’t help it.
Oh wow, I hadn’t heard that. I’m not sure I knew she was still with us. To think, Sexual Politics is FIFTY years old and almost NOTHING has changed. I can’t imagine how she felt about that.
“He was an egomaniac.”
In this context, maybe not the best word choice. ;-)
@Lady Mondegreen
Fair enough, glad you liked it. Different strokes etc.
The Wallace comparison didn’t help decide whether to read the book however. So, in the context of a book review it didn’t work for me.
And I think you give Miller too much credit. She doesn’t mention Millet or Sexual Politics, even though it is an important part of the history of Freud criticism that I would have appreciated hearing more about.
Latverian Diplomat–
I don’t mean to imply I think she had Millett in mind, but–and this was my point–Freud had enormous influence on the intellectual milieu of the 20th century, on literature, and especially on the writers Wallace had typed as “Phallocrats.” So I saw a connecting thread there. I suppose you’d have to be a literature nerd to see it. One with a hatred for Phallocrats.
Or maybe it’s just me.
Looks like Sigmund Freud was the Donald Trump of psychology, someone who was much better at self-promotion than at the work that he claimed that he was doing.
There are some further issues about Freudianism. Why was Freudianism so widely accepted in the first half of the twentieth century? Why did Freud seem like such a great discoverer back then? Was Freudianism helped by having colorful stories to tell? (argument by scenario) Why did Freudianism go into decline after that? Problems with his theories? Experience with alternatives to psychoanalysis?
Some of Freud’s critics have stated that while he was very good at coming up with theories, he was very bad at testing them. Is that a fair assessment?
Frederick Crews argues that Freud was not alone in doing “empathetic psychotherapy” or the “talking cure”, as it may be called. But in fairness to him, he popularized it. Consider why Galileo Galilei is much more famous for discovering mountains on the Moon than Thomas Harriot. TH saw them first, but he didn’t publicize he discovery. But GG did so.
Freud seemed like a great discoverer to literary types far more than to science types, even before his reputation really tanked post-war. Yes Freudianism was enormously helped by having colorful stories to tell – and by Freud’s bogus certainty and liberal use of phrases like “clinical experience has demonstrated.”
He didn’t test his theories at all. He literally just made shit up.
One reason F’ism went into decline is that it didn’t work.