Taking Seriously Vacuous Antimonies I Mean Antinomies
Just a small thing. I wanted to extract and keep a couple of comments by Frederick Crews from a longish piece on Philip Rieff because I think they’re interesting.
“The question ‘What can Freud teach us about the relation between our impulses and civilization?’ ceases to be interesting if it transpires that Freud didn’t actually make the discoveries he claimed to have made about the psyche,” says Frederick C. Crews, a professor emeritus of English at the University of California at Berkeley and a leading Freud skeptic.
Of course – oddly – a lot of people – well actually not a lot of people, but a sizable proportion of people in certain disciplines – think questions about what Freud can teach us about relations between various things don’t cease to be interesting no matter how clear it becomes that Freud didn’t actually make the discoveries he claimed to have made about the psyche. Their fixed idea (one might even call it an idée fixe) of Freud’s insight and profundity and originality seems to float completely free of any actual ontological status for his ‘discoveries’ about the psyche. There’s something puzzling and disconcerting about that.
“Rieff was brilliant in assessing the schismatics’ more simplistic visions of liberation, and he left us with the sense that Freud’s tough-mindedness, while hardly sufficient as a replacement for actual supernatural belief, deserved our sympathy and respect.” But Mr. Crews continues: “My feeling today is that those books of Rieff’s were period pieces, in three senses: In the intellectual style of the era, they overrated the extent to which social stability depends on the ideas of literary intellectuals; they overrated Freud’s permanent interest as a scientific pioneer; and as a result, they took seriously the vacuous antinomies of Civilization and Its Discontents, whereby a measure of ‘repression,’ causing personal unhappiness, is deemed requisite to the preservation of culture.”
Eloquent, isn’t it. That’s why I wanted to pull it out.
On the other hand, Norbert Elias had this desire to historicise Freud, and he went away and did a lot of rather good historical sociology, much of which does stand up to empirical testing.
So not everything inspired by Freudianism is ipso facto bad.
Never expected to see a learned discourse on chemical element 51 in N & C, and I’d never seen it in the plural before (though it’s true that there are two naturally-occurring isotopes and thus, in a sense, two antimonies).
Had to get down to the antipenultimate line to clear up my confusion!
(I know, everybody hates a smart-ass!)
‘Of course – oddly – a lot of people – well actually not a lot of people, but a sizable proportion of people in certain disciplines – think questions about what Freud can teach us about relations between various things don’t cease to be interesting no matter how clear it becomes that Freud didn’t actually make the discoveries he claimed to have made about the psyche.’
I’m not sure I agree with you. Freud’s writings ought to stand or fall based upon their own merits, not upon their author’s behaviour.
If we were to succeed in untangling Newton’s from Leibniz’s contributions to (and paternity of) calculus, would it change the validity of the writings of any one of the two?
brianr
Don’t! I once failed a philosophy of art essay aiignment rather spectacularly by continuously referring to Bullough’s concept of ‘the antimony of distance’.
‘Of course – oddly – a lot of people – well actually not a lot of people, but a sizable proportion of people in certain disciplines – think questions about what Freud can teach us about relations between various things don’t cease to be interesting no matter how clear it becomes that Freud didn’t actually make the discoveries he claimed to have made about the psyche.’
Interestingly, Vijayanur Ramachandran is one of those people. I recall hearing him say, in a radio broadcast, that Freud was a profound influence because he asked the right questions, even if he got the wrong answers. I disagree with Ramachandran, but his is not a voice easily to be dismissed.
I’ve heard Ramachandran a number of times, and when he talks about Freud it is evident that he (along with many other people) is unaware of much of the historical research of recent decades that has shown that many of the notions that people associate with Freud (such as unconscious mental processes) didn’t originate with Freud. They therefore make the mistake of thinking that but for Freud these areas of thought wouldn’t have come to the fore when they did.
Incidentally, can we have some examples of the “right questions” that Ramachandran had in mind.
There is a fascinating story to be told of how the medical profession, particulalry in the US, was taken in by Freudianism. I cannot understand how people who were trained to think in terms of biochemistry and microbiology could be taken in by talk of “Oedipus complex” and so on. Does anyone know of a book on this angle?
Nick Bogaerts writes:
>I’m not sure I agree with you. Freud’s writings ought to stand or fall based upon their own merits, not upon their author’s behaviour.< I’m not clear how this follows from the Ophelia’s quoted passage but I’ll comment on it as it stands. (As I understood it she was disputing that Freud ever made the ‘discoveries’ he claimed.) In Freud’s case his writings can’t be separated from his behaviour. Freud claimed to have made certain discoveries that can only be confirmed by the psychoanalytic methodology. This means we have to take such claims on trust. But when we have innumerably instances which demonstrate that his accounts of his experiences (both clinical and historical) are unreliable, we are justified in withholding acceptance of his claims. (This leaves out of the issue that many of Freud’s accounts of psychical processes are so absurd that one is justified on that count alone to be skeptical of his work as a whole, since it is based on the same methodological procedures.)
Nick Bogaerts writes:
>If we were to succeed in untangling Newton’s from Leibniz’s contributions to (and paternity of) calculus, would it change the validity of the writings of any one of the two?< I’m not sure this is a good instance of what Nick means to exemplify. As far as I’m aware there isn’t a problem in disentangling Newton’s contribution from Leibniz’s – their original work is available. (The priority dispute arose from the fact that Newton didn’t publish his writings on the Calculus until some time after he had written it.) Newton’s notation was very different from that of Leibniz, and they evidently produced their work independently. My impression is that Newton was the first to actually write his ideas down, and that Leibniz published his work first. And most certainly Leibniz had the best notation, which is why his has survived to the present day.
It does not matter who invented calculus because we can all have examine it and its enormous number of practical successes – for example most of physics uses it.
It would not matter how dishonest Freud was if we could point to the successes of the applications his ideas. Unfortunately when evaluating the success of any medical treatment we need to take into account phenomena such as spontaneous remission and the placebo effect. When evaluated properly psychoanalysis is foubnd to have nothing to offer and is positively harmful.
Paul Power:
On the rise and fall of psychoanalysis in the States, a recently published book may contain something of what you require:
The Fall of an Icon, by Joel Paris
Thanks Allen
How embarrassing – undone by a typo.
I’ll want to read that Joel Paris book too. I’ve been puzzling over the credulity of medically-trained US psychiatrists about Freud recently myself, while reading a quite interesting book Of Two Minds: an anthropologist looks at American psychiatry. The subject is the tension, rivalry, competition, sometimes combination, of pharmacology and talk therapy. It kept surprising me as I read how entirely, at least according to the author, the talk therapy of the equation for MD pyschiatrists until very recently meant psychoanalysts. That there was no other kind of medical pyschiatric talk therapy. That seems very odd.
*Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at American Psychiatry.* I had never heard of the author, Tanya Lurhmann, until a week ago, when her name appeared as the reviewer of Richard Webster’s lengthy investigation into the South Wales Children’s Homes sex abuse scandal, *The Secret of Bryn Estyn: The Making of a Modern Witch Hunt.* Although the review is favourable, Webster is far from pleased with it. In a telephone conversation he told me that her review omits mention of important information he thought she should have highlighted. No doubt more details of his criticisms will appear in the public domain in due course, which is why he is reticent about saying too much in his website comments. But points he makes about misreadings by the reviewer are worrying:
http://www.richardwebster.net/
Ah – that’s very interesting. I hadn’t heard of her either before simply happening on the book when browsing a used bookstore. It is quite good, I think – raises a lot of interesting questions and issues; is thoughtful, probing, etc. But I did keep wondering if her account was somewhat incomplete in places. But I don’t know if it is – just kept wondering.
Allen Esterson — ‘As I understood it she [Ophelia] was disputing that Freud ever made the ‘discoveries’ he claimed.)’
Precisely. Whether he made a groundbreaking discovery or not does not change anything to the validity of any of his other comments. That is Jesuit sophistry: ‘falsum in uno, falsum in toto’.
‘In Freud’s case his writings can’t be separated from his behaviour. Freud claimed to have made certain discoveries that can only be confirmed by the psychoanalytic methodology. This means we have to take such claims on trust.’
If the claims are not reproducible, then they are not valid, and no further discussion is necessary.
‘But when we have innumerably instances which demonstrate that his accounts of his experiences (both clinical and historical) are unreliable, we are justified in withholding acceptance of his claims.’
We are never justified in accepting any claim without verification, no matter the author. Since I have already started with latin locutions, I might as well quote Horace: ‘quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus.’ Even the great Homer dozes off sometimes.
Hmm. Going back to Fred’s original comment that I took off from –
“The question ‘What can Freud teach us about the relation between our impulses and civilization?’ ceases to be interesting if it transpires that Freud didn’t actually make the discoveries he claimed to have made about the psyche.”
and Nick’s objection to my version of the same thought –
“I’m not sure I agree with you. Freud’s writings ought to stand or fall based upon their own merits, not upon their author’s behaviour.”
But the merits of Freud’s writings (and, more to the point, his truth claims) are the issue, aren’t they? Surely Fred’s point is that the only reason people ask ‘What can Freud teach us about the relation between our impulses and civilization?’ is because they take him to have discovered something. If it turns out that he didn’t discover anything, people would no more ask what Freud could teach us about the relation between our impulses and civilization than they would ask someone they sat next to on the bus. Would they? If they would, the question becomes why, and why don’t they ask people they sit next to on the bus.
That Bryn Estyn thing is fascinating. Another Little Rascals case, another Remembering Satan case.
And the tv dramatization is interesting – another ‘Hear the Silence’. If you haven’t got the evidence, hey, just put on a tv ‘drama’ to make your case. Peachy.
>Another Little Rascals case, another Remembering Satan case.< If Webster is right, it is much bigger than either of these, as his book deals with a lengthy series of investigations that led to a large number of accusations (and convictions) relating to many Children’s Homes. And it does not relate to current accusations by young children, but ones made by adults a couple of decades after the alleged abuse. I hope to learn more than the limited amount I’ve picked up over time when he sends me the copy he has promised me!
Yet another nest of – trouble.
I meant the Little Rascals case partly as a sort of synechdoche – the Little Rascals case [and many others like it].
Oy, oy, oy. I’ll have to do another In Focus. Loftus, Ofshe, Frontline – there’s an ocean of material on all this. Really ought to have it in one place. [wanders off muttering to self]
Yes, I agree that there is no reason to believe a claim by Freud is more interesting than a claim by the guy on the bus; that is an issue of authority: there are none in science (hence probably why psychoanalysis is pseudoscience).
But to disqualify everything by Freud because he lied about what was his contribution and that of others is also fallacious; I mentioned Leibnitz because there are reasons to believe he got at least some of his ideas for calculus off Newton: we know he had access to some of Newton’s material prior to its publication which he refused to acnowledge. But whether or not this is true, Leibnitz’s writings remain interesting. Conversly, Newton was a very nasty man: but it doesn’t make him wrong.
Material does not cease to be interesting: either it was in the first place and will remain so, or it never was, and never will be. We should pay no more attention to Freud than to the guy on the bus: there’s nothing stopping the next Einstein from using public transport.
“Material does not cease to be interesting: either it was in the first place and will remain so, or it never was, and never will be.”
Hmmm. That ought to be true, perhaps, but I really don’t think it is. Look at Tennyson, for example…
To answer Nick Bogaerts: calculus was not discovered – it was invented. It is a mathematical tool whose usefulness has been validated by the success of its use in e.g. physics.
Regarding Freud’s ideas : the proper comparison is with scientific theories, since both make truth claims about the nature of reality. Take infantile sexual fantasies as an example. His patients did not remember these fantasies, rather Freud – and his followers – tried to force the patients to believe they had. And because of the power of suggestion some people come to believe they had such fantasies, thereby offering spurious confirmation. Using calculus in some equations to send a rocket to the moon is different because whether the rocket fulfils its mission is beyond human suggestibility to affect
Nick Bogaerts writes:
>But to disqualify everything by Freud because he lied about what was his contribution and that of others is also fallacious.< First, one shouldn’t dismiss everything Freud wrote, but treat it on its merits.
Second, the disqualification of most of Freud’s contentions is not on the basis that he lied about what was his contribution and that of others. They should be disqualified on grounds such as that he proclaimed an esoteric means of divining the contents of a person’s unconscious mind that only his methodology can achieve (a contention only accepted by his followers); he misrepresented his clinical findings; his general accounts of his experiences were often grossly misleading; he falsely claimed various findings had been confirmed; he used dubious means of persuading his readers of the truth of his contentions; he grossly exaggerated (prior to his last publications) the therapeutic efficacy of psychoanalysis; he built much of the essence of his general expositions on the basis of unvalidated and unlikely psychoanalytic concepts.
I think that will do for now.
Notwithstanding anything else, one cannot deny that Freud *is* one of the fathers of the modern [or postmodern?] age, just as Darwin, Marx, Einstein and a whole bunch of others are. That is his historicity, and if what he wrote was crap, well then so was Aristotle’s flannel and Plato’s gibberish and Descartes’s nonsense [each one backed by a metaphysics which just makes no sense to the contemporary atheist…]. We can do without them all, because we have surpassed them; or have we?
Now, Freud’s near-criminal abuse of his patients, that’s another issue; but he cannot lose a historical significance already cemented by the course of history itself…
The point that Dave thinks the significant indictment against Freud I would question:
>Now, Freud’s near-criminal abuse of his patients.< What evidence is there that Freud’s treatment of his patients (*as a generality*) was “near-criminal abuse”? As for Freud’s being one of the “fathers of the modern age”, I’d like to know what Dave means by that. These generalized assertions are made, and people nod acquiescence, but is it true (outside of the States in much of the twentieth century)? Certainly in the UK Freud’s influence has been far less than in the States, both in psychiatry and in the general culture. And to suggest that what he wrote was on a par with that of Aristotle and Plato, given their historical context, is (IMHO) absurd. What viewing the latter philosophers through the lens of “the contemporary atheist” has to do with assessing their historical achievements is not something I can grasp. >We can do without them all, because we have surpassed them; or have we?< As far as I can make out, this comment implies that many of the criticisms of Freud depend on hindsight. (Certainly that seems to be the grounds for the comparison with Aristotle and Plato.) But, in essence, much of the criticism of Freud is not based on hindsight; there was little justification for his contentions from the start, considered in the context of his day. And many critics said as much at the time. Moll, for instance, pointed out that his impression was that Freud’s theories sufficed to account for his clinical ‘findings’, rather than that the latter validated his theories. Janet complained that “by using a little interpretation, displacement, dramatization and elaboration, and a very little critical mind, one can generalize in this way on any subject whatsoever and make everything out of anything.”
P.S. Dave writes: >Now, Freud’s near-criminal abuse of his patients, that’s another issue.< Does that mean he doesn’t think the indictments I listed are an important issue?
“And many critics said as much at the time.”
Well worth keeping in mind. The myth is that critics at the time were merely shocked at the sexual content of Freud’s theories, when in fact 1) his colleagues and peers weren’t shocked about that and 2) that was far from the only source of criticism. Freud is so encrusted in myth that it’s easy to lose sight of that. (Or never learn it in the first place. I certainly wouldn’t be aware of it if I hadn’t read Allen and other critics and investigators.)