Do We Need Freud?

I am not an aficionado of the thought of Toronto psychologist Paul Bloom. I was made aware of it in the past through his book, Against Empathy. I have maintained considerable respect for anyone who is willing to challenge the current mania about empathy. 

Empathy is not a panacea. Given that the best way to enhance your capacity for empathy is to get pregnant-- no kidding-- the feeling seems to have real value when dealing with infants. If you use empathy in your standard therapy practice you will be infantilizing people, which is not a good idea when dealing with adults.

Anyway, Bloom offered a rather strange and wrong-headed view of Freud in a radio interview, on station KCRW.

Astonishingly, Bloom seems to want to raise Freud from the dead. As you know and as Bloom knows, Freud’s reputation has been seriously undermined. His theories have largely been debunked as pseudo-science, and the treatments conducted according to his ideas have consistently been ineffective.

And, of course, Freudian institutions have come to function as cults. Take it from someone who spent time in the bosom of one of them.

“To some extent, modern psychologists see him as if we're sort of a pharmaceutical company that got its start by selling meth,” Bloom explains “Freud is an embarrassment, with his florid claims about penis envy and the Oedipal complex, his bizarre personal interactions, [and] his cult-like following, and now we're a science, so we want none of him.”

And yet, the Oedipus complex is not a trivial excrescence. It is the essence of Freudian theory. The Viennese neurologist was selling a narrative, a mythos, a story that pretended to explain human behavior and the human mind.

Most people now see Freud as useless; Bloom sees glimmers of truth.

Bloom explains that “we get some glimmers of truth in Freud” as he had “the view that we live a life at war with ourselves, where we have all of these psychological systems designed to keep forbidding stuff from rising into consciousness.” 

He was assuming that the mind is merely designed to trick us into thinking too much of ourselves. Doesn’t your mind have better things to do with its time?

And then, Bloom trots out a shopworn argument, namely that we are led around by our feelings and emotions, and do not act rationally. As it happens, Freud did not argue that we are led around by our passions; he argued that we are influenced by our desires.

And yet, didn’t Aristotle suggest that, our passions and desires notwithstanding, we are capable, as rational beings, of suspending our biases and making an intelligent decision. If Freud were right, the world would be a rather chaotic place. Nothing would ever get done.

Freud recognized that “we're not rational computers making our way through the world by making the best decisions in our own interest. Rather, there's this inner turmoil, a lot of which goes beneath the surface.”  At the time, Freud’s claim that “we don't know why we feel what we feel” was considered radical and shocking. 

Truth be told, the psycho field has been chock full of therapists who want us to feel our feelings and to know why we feel what we feel. They are not really Freudians. It has far too few practitioners who want us to do what we ought to be doing to be honorable citizens.

Having warped Freud beyond recognition, Bloom introduces an unfortunate caricature of B. F. Skinner, the founder of behaviorism. He slanders Skinner and ignores the therapies that have derived from his theories.

Skinner was the founder of “behaviorism” and  saw humans as “just rats in a more complicated environment.” Bloom explains Skinner’s view that “there’s no coherent sense of talking about the complexity of the mind, because there is no mind.” Skinner’s theories that “the same psychological processes that could explain the behavior of rats and pigeons could explain the behavior of humans,” ultimately turned out to be a disaster, but very much like Freud, Skinner demonstrated “enthusiasm” and “willingness to take an idea and push for it.”

If you are happy to traffic in metaphysical entities, you can whine about the mind. And yet, aside from Skinner, we can also read the works of one Gilbert Ryle, especially his book, The Concept of Mind, to find these ideas explained, without even worrying about rats.

Obviously, Bloom’s is a gratuitous slander, one that ignores the successful treatments that have been offered by behavioral and cognitive psychologists. These psychologists do not see behaviors, normal and pathological, as expressions of mental processes, but more as bad habits. In truth, this notion comes to us from Aristotle, who did not believe that human beings were all rats.

So, the minds of the psycho profession have been marinating in Freudian theory for more than a century. The result is not encouraging:

What surprises Bloom the most is how “stagnant” advances in psychology have been over the last 30 years. Not much has changed with regards to treatment for even severe conditions like schizophrenia, he notes. “We don't know what to do about it, we can't cure it,” Bloom says. “You would have thought that we would have made more progress, but we haven't.” 

So, therapy has been stagnant. Aside from cognitive and behavioral approaches, psychologists have little to offer schizophrenics. It might be useful to consider that schizophrenia is not a psychological condition, but is a neurological condition, one that responds fairly well to some medications. 

I am surprised that Bloom does not refer to the advances in psychopharmacology, especially those that have largely improved the treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

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