Returning to Freud

Is Freud making a comeback? Has the Viennese neurologist risen from the dead, to smite the hordes of cognitive therapists and psychopharmacologists? Is Freudian analysis now the treatment of choice for sophisticated New York intellectuals, or is it yet another fad that refuses to die out.

One might say that cognitive treatments and Prozac were overhyped. They are surely better than psychoanalysis at producing positive clinical outcomes, but they are not exactly panaceas. When Prozac was introduced the press was flooded with stories about patients who had spent years on the couch, to no avail, but who improved significantly after they started taking the pills.

Of course, the flood of articles about these alternative treatments told us that psychoanalysis does not work. It did not work then and does not work now. In effect, the New York Times notwithstanding, few analysts today offer orthodox psychoanalytic treatment and few patients seek it. Insurance companies will not pay $400 an hour four days a week for an untested and ineffective treatment, and that surely means something.

It must have been a slow news day, because the New York Times has announced breathlessly that Freudian treatment is coming back. It is not. The Times is wrong, but you would have expected as much.

Anyway, fair is fair. Here is the Times assessment:

Around the country, on divans and in training institutes, on Instagram meme accounts and in small magazines, young (or at least young-ish) people are rediscovering the talking cure, along with the ideas of the Viennese doctor who developed it at the turn of the 20th century.

There is still some general interest in Freud. I guess that it is limited to woke graduate students, to radical leftists and to neo-socialists who want to overthrow the patriarchy.

But, interest there is:

For instance, the Instagram account freud.intensifies has more than a million followers and posts memes like a portrait of Freud overlaid with the text “Every time you call your boyfriend ‘Daddy,’ Sigmund Freud’s ghost becomes a little stronger.” In an April 2022 TikTok, which has been watched nearly five million times, a young man extols Freud: “Fast forward a hundred years, and he ain’t miss yet!”

The magazine Parapraxis, which was started last year to “inquire into and uncover the psychosocial dimension of our lives,” has attracted a progressive “new psychoanalysis crowd.” The forthcoming film “Freud’s Last Session,” starring Anthony Hopkins, is currently filming in a reconstruction of Freud’s famous Hampstead study, complete with antiquities. The Showtime series “Couples Therapy” documents several patients who see Orna Guralnik, a New York psychoanalyst and psychologist. “Know Your Enemy,” an au courant lefty podcast, has devoted multiple episodes to discussions of Freud, who has become a frequent topic of conversation among the show’s hosts.

In an increasingly woke culture, Freud still has a place. He has taught people to tell stories about their lives. Similarly, a Jungian psychologist like Jordan Peterson has happily sold people the mythmaking and storytelling that was promoted by the Swiss psychoanalyst. 

Of course, however popular this reconstituted Jungianism is, one does well not to forget that Jung at first supported the Third Reich and managed to admire Adolph Hitler. 

Freud himself was a man of the radical left. His followers, in France at least, were all-in for the Chinese Cultural Revolution. And he has exercised an outsized cultural interest.

Like anything formative from long in the past, Freud never totally disappeared. Some of his concepts, like denial and libido, are so deeply embedded in popular culture that we no longer even think of them as Freudian. And no young century that has canonized “The Sopranos,” which featured many sessions of Tony’s psychotherapy with Dr. Melfi, as well as episode-long dream sequences, could be completely devoid of “golden Siggie,” as Freud’s mother reportedly called him.

The reason for the return to Freud seems to lie in the fact that Prozac and other SSRIs have been overhyped. Of course, psychoanalysis is basically ineffective for the treatment of depression, so one does not quite understand the reasoning here:

But some high-profile research has raised doubts about the science behind selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, a class of medications frequently prescribed to treat depression and anxiety. And a younger generation has grown at least a bit skeptical about the way insurance companies and venture-backed mental health startups seem to favor cognitive-behavioral therapy, perhaps paving the way for this renewed interest in less symptom-focused forms of treatment.

True enough, the younger generation has become somewhat skeptical about cognitive treatments, but these latter have largely worked where psychoanalysis never has. Young people who are looking to join cults are drawn to psychoanalysis, but if they seek positive clinical outcomes, they will be disappointed.