Freud Reduced

Today, the New York Times reviews Frederick Crews’s new book: Freud: The Making of an Illusion. Reviewer George Prochnik tries to find good and bad in Freud. He tries to present a balanced view. Where Crews indicts Freud as a fraudulent imposter, Prochnik still clings to the illusion that we can draw some good from our adventures in Freudland.

Since Freud’s hagiographers, from Ernest Jones to Elisabeth Roudinesco, have worked long and hard to make Freud into something like a deity—a demiurge, I have suggested—Crews has every reason to debunk the claims. If psychoanalysis is a cult—in my terms, a pseudo-religion—to an idol, then one way to release people from its hold is to expose the fraud behind it. It's like tearing back the curtain on the wizard of Oz.

As for whether you can find some redeeming features in Freud, I side with Crews. Psychoanalysis is a closed intellectual system, roughly like the first order predicate calculus. Once you accept the validity of its founding axioms, the rest of the theory falls into place. True enough, you can find empirical evidence that appears to support its theories, but you can find some empirical evidence to support any bogus theory. 

Karl Popper famously explained decades ago that psychoanalysis cannot be science because it does not admit to any facts that would disprove its theories. At that point, it is not empirical science, but a method to produce fictional beings who live in a fictional world. I explained this in more detail in my book: The Last Psychoanalyst.

In my book I offered my ideas about why the great Freudian scam has lasted so long. At the least, we know that I was not the first to raise the issue. Since it's a pseudo-religion with cult followers Freudian theory cannot be disproved by empirical evidence.

In 1975 famed Oxford biologist and Nobel laureate Peter Medawar asked this question:

… psychoanalysts will continue to perpetrate the most ghastly blunders just so long as they persevere in their impudent and intellectually disabling belief that they enjoy “a privileged access to the truth.” The opinion is gaining ground that doctrinaire psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous confidence trick of the twentieth century; and, to borrow an image I have used elsewhere, a terminal practice as well—something akin to a dinosaur or a zeppelin in the history of ideas: a vast structure with radically unsound design and with no posterity.

Now, on to Prochnik’s effort to salvage what he may from the calamity of Freudian thinking:

By identifying sexual desire as a universal drive with endlessly idiosyncratic objects determined by individual experiences and memories, Freud, more than anyone, not only made it possible to see female desire as a force no less powerful or valid than male desire; he made all the variants of sexual proclivity dance along a shared erotic continuum. In doing so, Freud articulated basic conceptual premises that reduced the sway of experts who attributed diverse sexual urges to hereditary degeneration or criminal pathology. His work has allowed many people to feel less isolated and freakish in their deepest cravings and fears.

This sounds good. It is a distortion. Freud believed that this universal sex drive was defined and determined by an incest wish. People desire sexual objects because they cannot have the one true object of their sexual desire: their mother. Ignore this and you are ignoring Freud.

Freud also believed that heterosexual copulation was normal and that all other forms of sexual behavior were perverse. He saw homosexuality as sexual inversion. Freud was not a postmodern hero. Back in the day, when psychoanalysis was in its heyday, homosexuality was considered to be something that needed to be cured. Psychoanalyst Richard Isay wrote about this issue extensively.

Prochnik has also provided a litany of ideas that he believes we owe to Freud. He writes:

The idea that large parts of our mental life remain obscure or even entirely mysterious to us; that we benefit from attending to the influence of these depths upon our surface selves, our behaviors, language, dreams and fantasies; that we can sometimes be consumed by our childhood familial roles and even find ourselves re-enacting them as adults; that our sexuality might be as ambiguous and multifaceted as our compendious emotional beings and individual histories — these core conceits, in the forms they circulate among us, are indebted to Freud’s writings. Now that we’ve effectively expelled Freud from the therapeutic clinic, have we become less neurotic? With that baneful “illusion” gone, and with all our psychopharmaceuticals and empirically grounded cognitive therapy techniques firmly in place, can we assert that we’ve advanced toward some more rational state of mental health than that enjoyed by our forebears in the heyday of analysis?

Unfortunately, Prochnik does not understand the difference between claiming that something is true and demonstrating scientifically that something is true. Freud was a great fabulator. He was a great storyteller. He taught people how to concoct tales that seemed to demonstrate that past traumas and a bad upbringing were responsible for everything that has gone wrong in your life. This mania about explaining things, about pretending to gain insight induced far too many people to turn away from reality and to get lost in their minds.

As for whether we have become less neurotic, we have certainly become less depressed. In truth, Freudian theory is a system for manufacturing depression. Thus, no Freudian or post-Freudian theory has ever had any success treating depression. For those who understand that neurosis and depression are not the same thing the advent of cognitive therapy and SSRIs was the final nail in the Freudian coffin. When patients who had been induced to remain mildly depressed through years of Freudian treatment discovered that they could, by taking a pill, doing cognitive treatment, or, more importantly, adopting an exercise regimen overcome their depression psychoanalysis died.

Since Freudian psychoanalysis was never more than a cult, its followers never really attained to anything resembling a rational mental state. True Freudians more closely resemble fanatics than rational actors. Surely, the story of psychoanalysis in France demonstrates this point. 

In other cities, psychoanalysts simply did not know how to get along with each other. The history of psychoanalytic institutions comprises splits, schisms, conflict and struggle. That's why New York has had dozens of psychoanalytic institutions. When the meaning of your life is your desire, there is no way to verify empirically that your want this and not that. True, as Lacan pointed out, we know that you cannot want what you have, but you certainly do not want everything that you do not have. Thus, the theory is obliged to say that you only want what is tabooed or forbidden.

The closest Freud came to offering an empirical proof of desire was his notion that when a woman says  that she wants something and when she gets what she wants, if she is unsatisfied—which was Freud’s view of the female condition—this means that she does not know what she wants.

As I have suggested, convincing a woman that she does not know what she wants but that you, her analyst does, is a seducer’s trick. It is not science. It is not rational. It is not something that we should continue to embrace.