Testing, Testing
A reader raises some interesting objections, in Letters and then at my suggestion in a comment, on our Freud-skepticism.
For example, there may be an alternative explanation for Jedlika’s finding that children of mixed race couples are more likely to marry someone of the same race as the opposite sex parent, but it is prima facie evidence for oedipal feelings that cannot be ignored.
I haven’t read the study in question – but just to deal with what is said in that sentence, I have to say I am not convinced. I am in fact quite skeptical. It seems to me that it is not at all obvious that oedipal feelings are the only possible explanation for why children of mixed race couples would tend to marry someone of the same race as the opposite sex parent. Other explanations leap to mind – for instance the idea that marriageable people in general are of the same race as the opposite sex parent. Of course one can by fiat simply equate notions of what makes people ‘marriageable’ with oedipal feelings, but again, that’s not the only possible conclusion. And in any case, the basic disagreement with Freud’s Oedipus complex is not mostly to do with sexual feelings for the opposite sex parent, but with such feelings in infancy. It’s the infancy part that Freud was adamant about, and that many colleagues disagreed with him about. Freud wasn’t just saying that everyone has sex on the brain, he was saying that everyone has sex on the brain starting with infancy. Would Jedlika’s findings as described above seem to corroborate the Oedipus complex in infancy? I don’t see why they would.
I googled Fisher and Greenberg, and found a review by Richard Webster. Not a fan of Freud’s, of course – but let’s see what he says all the same.
Once again, they have failed to recognise that Freud was at least right about one thing: that psychoanalytic theories, being based on the psychoanalyst’s unique access to the hidden realm of the unconscious, are not susceptible to empirical investigation.
And they are both clinical psychologists themselves, so the same problem arises in their own line of work. Clinical psychologists have an as it were vocational skepticism about the value of empirical investigation.
In an effort to discover whether Freud’s penis=baby equation was correct, and whether it is indeed true that some women have babies to supply themselves with the penises that they lack, Fisher and Greenberg tell us that they ‘reasoned that if pregnancy is somehow a penis equivalent for women, they should have increased unconscious phallic sensations or feelings at that time’. Omitting to consider the equally plausible Freudian hypothesis that pregnancy, by supplying a ‘real’ phallic substitute, might lead to a decrease in phallic fantasising, our intrepid researchers go on to devise a ‘phallic scoring system’ based on a count of responses to the Holtzman Inkblot Test involving ‘projections, protrusions and elongations’ that Freud would have deemed phallic. Having administered this remarkable test to a group of presumably puzzled pregnant women, they concluded that (though no data are given) ‘the findings were nicely congruent with the hypothesis’. No doubt they were also nicely congruent with all manner of other hypotheses that Fisher and Greenberg, intent on looking at the world through Freudian spectacles, never paused to formulate.
Well…you see what I mean. If that’s Fisher and Greenberg’s idea of an empirical investigation, then – I remain unconvinced.
IMO an even simpler explanation is “when I grow up I want to be just like my Mom/Dad”. Emulation, not Oedipus.
And I’ll take advantage of my position in this thread to repeat my recommendation for:
“House of Cards: psychology and psychotherapy built on myth” by Robyn M. Dawes, 1994.
Thanks, I’ll make a note of the book – and even try to read it!
I thought of the emulation idea but the trouble with that is, it’s not clear what emulation would mean for a mixed-race child. Either race is both the same and the other, so emulation isn’t quite possible.
On the other hand of course it’s also possible that race isn’t a factor. (In fact that reminds me – I read something just yesterday about a study that suggests the perception of race is not really mentally encoded the way perception of sex and age is.) It seems like the sort of thing that would be difficult to rule out in such a study…but I don’t know.
OB:
I meant emulation in the sense of marrying the same race of person as the parent married–boy grows up and marries a woman of the same race as mother; girl, same race as father.
Or alternatively some semi-evolutionary psychology explanation such as we learn in infancy what our archetypal member of the opposite sex should look like from our opposite sex parent, in a similar manner to Freud’s explanation but without the need to have any sexual feelings for that archetype.
An alternative though, could be to do with the skewed gender distibutions in mixed race relationships (e.g. more black men than black women) giving a false correlation.
I admit that the Fisher and Greenberg study is a bit silly, and there are many just as absurd in their book. However, they are not all like that.
Short of detailing every study that is a reasonable test I don’t know if I’m going to convince anyone here. I’ll restrict myself to one example here (in addition to the Adams study I have mentioned elsewhere).
Studies based on Freud’s idea of an anal retentive personality have identified a consistent correlation between measures of meannnes, neatness and obstinancy, just as Freud would have predicted. Again, I’m not claiming this is definitive evidence but it is *relevant*. All I’m claiming is that there are decent tests and some of them are prima facie evidence. I wouldn’t go any further than that.
I wouldn’t disagree with the interpretations of Jedlika’s findings; all it shows is that aspects of Freud’s theory are testable, even if the available evidence is not perfect.
The crucial point here is that the majority of studies in Psychology are subject to different interpretations, especially in developmental psychology where experiments are virtually impossible. In that sense, Freud’s theories are no more or less susceptible to empirical test than any other theory in developmental psychology. This is why I think that Freud- bashing is unfair.
In relation to the point that Freud’s claims about sexuality relate to childhood, this is true but his theory also makes predictions about adult sexuality. Anyway, Brown (Human Universals) reviewed the anthropolgical record and concluded that strong attachment to the mother and rejection of the father is a universal stage that boys in particular pass through around the age of 4-5. Brown is a convert to evolutionary psychology so is probably a less biased source than Fisher and Greenberg.
Just to clarify my own beliefs; I reject a lot of Freud’s claims (evolutionary psychology and behavioural genetics are my favoured approaches) but I think he’s being treated unfairly, particularly on the issue of whether his theories are susceptible to empirical testing. On this issue my answer is; not much less than any other theory of development.
Notional Slurry ruminates on Symbolic Regression in Genetic Programming:
http://williamtozier.com/slurry/comment/engineering/minimizeThis.html
Mark,
Why ‘Freud-bashing’? Why not just Freud-criticism?
It may be that some of Freud’s claims are testable. I’m not aware of being particularly invested in the idea that they’re not. But one serious problem with Freud is the way he claimed that many (if not most) of his findings were corroborated by evidence – which was never forthcoming. He used the words as a kind of rhetorical bludgeon without ever producing the goods. That is not good practice.
PM: Good points. I think this claim of “prima facie evidence” is now exposed as an exaggeration.
“psychoanalytic theories, being based on the psychoanalyst’s unique access to the hidden realm of the unconscious, are not susceptible to empirical investigation.”
Robyn Dawes addresses this issue because even today many therapists follow Freud in this mistake. They continue to rely on their “clinical intuitions” and dismiss empirical studies which show that intuitive conclusions can be seriously flawed.
All I mean by ‘prima facie evidence’ is that the evidence is at least consistent with Freudian predictions. I certainly do not think that ‘clinical intuitions’ are anything other than worthless. I’m not excluding the possibility of alternative explanations of findings at all. In many cases there are plausible alternative explanations.
For example, the fact that we are attracted to those who resemble our parent may be explained by the our attraction for those who resemble ourselves. However, in this case research (in New Scientist a year or two ago; sorry I can’t be more specific) found that after controlling for resmblance to ourselves there was still a tendency to be attracted to those who resemble our parents.
I agree that Freud seriously exaggerated the evidence he had available to him. However, lack of evidence is not the same as evidence of a lack; others have done the research to fill the gap.
Why ‘Freud bashing’? Because it seems that many people are unwilling to separate their dislike of Freud from the empirical question of whether his theories are supported by evidence.
I’ll be reading Webster as soon as time allows and I’ll be back to you on that one.
I really think that my position is a minimal one; treat Freud’s theories as you would any other psychological theory, i.e., as a set of propositions that can be tested by research.
Any comments on the Adams et al study of homophobia yet?
No comments on the Adams et al study yet because I haven’t looked at it yet! Sorry about that – it’s on the list, but the list is a long one.
Really, my dislike of Freud (to the extent that it exists) originates with the lack of evidence – combined with the flatness of his assertions. I can remember being half-buffaloed as a high school and university student by that very tactic – by that ‘psychoanalysis has discovered through clinical experience’ ploy, and I resent it. It’s a confidence trick, and I dislike epistemological confidence tricks. If I remember correctly (and I may not, I may be flattering myself) I had at least a vestige of suspicion of those statements even then – I wondered why they always were mere assertions, why he never said exactly what the evidence was. But I also partly took his word for it. Hence my dislike now – that’s a kind of training in bad thinking. Freud must have taught generations of students to take claims on authority, claims they wouldn’t have taken on authority from people without the aura of scientific reliability that we thought he had. In short, if I had been told Freud was a literary figure I would have understood his claims in quite a different sense from the way I did understand them – I thought they were really empirical truth-claims.