For a century or more, Sigmund Freud has cast a long shadow not just over the field of psychoanalysis but over the entire way we think of ourselves as human beings. His theory of the unconscious and his work on dreams, in particular, retain a firm grip on the western imagination, shaping the realms of literature and art, politics and everyday conversation, as well as the way patients are analysed in the consulting room. Since Freud’s death in 1939, however, a growing number of dissenting voices have questioned his legacy and distanced themselves from his ideas. Now Freud is viewed less as a great medical scientist than as a powerful storyteller of the human mind whose texts, though lacking in empirical evidence, should be celebrated for their literary value.
The following debate, conducted through emails, was prompted by the forthcoming publication of Frederick Crews’s book Freud: The Making of an Illusion, which draws on new research materials to raise fresh questions about Freud’s competence and integrity.
Susie Orbach: Some of us come to Freud early, some late. You are in the earlier category, I am in the later one. You claim you left Freud 30 years ago but your continued obsession with the man, with his work, with proving that Freud was contradictory, goes to show the continuing significance, not of Freud the man per se, but of his ideas and impact on a wider, cultural level. His work has had an impact of such magnitude that it’s not possible for us to think about what it means to be human, what motivates us, what we yearn for, without those very questions being Freudian.
Freud’s conceptions of the human mind and its complexity, whether exactly accurate, are not at issue here. What is worth talking about is the way in which late-20th-century and early-21st-century culture have taken up what they have understood of his ideas.
It is very easy to dismantle the specific interpretations of Freud. Every generation does and I have done so myself. That is not to do away with Freud. Rather, it shows the strength of the edifice he created. Many aspects of public policy, from understandings of social and interpersonal violence and racism to the construction of masculinity, sexuality, gender, war, use psychoanalytic ideas not as the explanation but as an explanatory tool aiding economic and statistical understandings of why we do the things we do.
Frederick Crews: No one disputes the enormous extent of Freud’s influence. The question before us is whether we ought, on balance, to be grateful for it. You revere Freud because he helped to make us the sages we are pleased to be – people who can’t even “think about what it means to be human” in non-Freudian terms. But perhaps it is time now to remove those blinders and think afresh.
If, as you say, psychoanalytic theory has functioned as a powerfully shaping “explanatory tool”, surely it matters whether Freud’s explanations ever made empirical sense. If they didn’t, the likelihood is considerable that he raised false hopes, unfairly distributed shame and blame, retarded fruitful research and education, and caused patients’ time and money to be needlessly squandered. Indeed, all of those effects have been amply documented.
In your writings, you assert that Freud’s emphasis on the Oedipus complex was androcentric and wrong; that he misrepresented female sexual satisfaction and appears to have disapproved of it; that envy of the penis, if it exists at all, is not a key determinant of low self-esteem among women; and that his standard of normality was dictated by patriarchal bias, thus fostering “the control and subjugation of women”.
This list, which could be readily expanded, constitutes an indictment not only of harmful conclusions but also of the arbitrary, cavalier method by which they were reached. Yet elsewhere in your texts, you refer to Freud’s “discovery of the unconscious” and to his “discovery of an infantile and childhood sexuality”. Were those alleged breakthroughs achieved in a more objective manner than the “discovery” of penis envy? What are the grounds on which any of Freud’s claims deserve to be credited?
SO: We are on different planets here. My job is to listen, to engage with the world of the analysand, to hear their difficulties, confusions, conflicts, agonies and questions. These don’t come pre-formed. There is nothing formulaic about the conversation in the consulting room. It is a space of exploration.
Knowledge is provisional. It is not static, and the kinds of knowledge of the consulting room exquisitely express this. This is not to say we don’t know anything. Therapists build up considerable knowledge about the way the human mind deals with the indigestible. People don’t come because they are happy, they come because their life has stalled. They perceive themselves to have got stuck, they feel emotionally constipated. They suffer with intrusive self-critical thoughts. Addressing these things is the meat and potatoes of our work. It is out of this engagement that our understandings emerge. Subjectivity, particularly in the process of self-reflection and potential change, is not empirical per se. It is a lived experience, and analysis provides a frame for the individual to investigate their modes of being, feeling and thinking. Psychoanalysis is the study of human subjectivity. It is a clinical practice. It theorises the vicissitudes of human attachment, of the psychological development of mind and body that occur within a relational, cultural field.
FC: But weren’t we talking about Sigmund Freud? Unexpectedly, you have provided the man with an “invisibility cloak”, not only by ceasing to mention him but also by sidestepping all of his novelties, both theoretical and clinical. In your prose, psychoanalysis has ballooned into the cosmically huge and vague “study of human subjectivity” – and who would dare complain about that? Likewise, Freud’s practice disappears within your own, which, as you characterise it, consists of an empathetic listening that is free of preconceptions. That’s admirable if true, but it means that your approach is exactly opposite to that of Freud. Notoriously, he contradicted, discomfited and harangued his patients in the hope of breaking their “resistance” to ideas of his own – ideas that he presumptuously declared to be lurking within the patients’ own unconscious minds.
I find it striking that Freud vanished from your discourse as soon as I asked you to say why we ought to believe any of his propositions. That issue is crucial to an assessment of his legacy. His unsupported claims – for example, that repressed incidents from the first years of life can be reliably unearthed; that, thanks to phylogenetic programming, all toddlers wish to kill their same-sex parent and copulate with the other one; that women are biologically inferior, childlike, devious and masochistic – have yielded many noxious consequences.
One such consequence has been an ongoing disregard, by psychoanalysts and their academic allies, of the principle that hypotheses ought to be held accountable to a preponderance of evidence. Freud’s psychological writings contain not a single item of raw data. We meet only “psychoanalytic findings”, suave stories, evasions and heroic posturing. That charade has seduced many an unwary professor, including yours truly 50 years ago. Even today, regrettably, the Freudian vogue in its least rational (Lacanian) form remains entrenched in the humanities.
Freud, though not on hand to defend himself, has a lot to answer for. What can you enter on the other side of the ledger?
SO: Here’s what I see as our difficulty, – you want the world to see Freud as a scoundrel and a bully, and you want me to repeat my own difficulties with his specific interpretations of unconscious processes. I’m not a throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bathwater type. Just as Newtonian physics has been superseded and Darwin was not the only person working on evolution, physicists and biologists don’t need to trash their predecessor in order to move the field along. The 1950s was a terrible time for psychoanalysis: it turned ideological and was used to send women back to the home after the social changes of the second world war. That’s why the infusion of 70s feminism was so critical to psychoanalysis’s reinvigoration and rethinking. Out of that has grown a more nuanced understanding of early attachment and how its impact is elaborated, of the complicated feelings and identities children have towards their parents, of the way in which mothers are not simply the failing objects of their children but are women struggling with their own legacies and subjectivity, of the fragility of masculinity.
Freud can be easily attacked for his understanding of homosexuality but have you looked at his understandings of primary bisexuality? Of course you have and you know how much early experience and our cultural, familial, class and geographic setting contributes to our personal understandings of who we are and can be.
I can see that the colonisation of literary criticism by aspects of psychoanalysis must have been wearying for you. It always amuses and sometimes irritates me when other fields take up psychoanalysis, for they tend to freeze it and use concepts that practitioners have either jettisoned or contested. I know physicists and mathematicians who groan when their work is appropriated by literary types and used as metaphor, so I empathise with your annoyance, but an argument about a Freud that I don’t use makes no sense to me when there is so much in the Freud legacy that does. Yes. I still find him illuminating.
FC: The main reason why we’re having trouble connecting is that we perceive Freud from sharply different angles – so much so that he appears to be two distinct personages. In your judgment, he founded a tradition that has survived into this century not because of any truths he unearthed but because feminists and others have successfully adapted his clinical procedure to goals, values and ideas largely alien to his own.
For this role of ghostly ancestor, the actual man Freud isn’t needed or even wanted. But the historical Freud is the one whose legacy we are supposed to be debating. Did he tell the truth about his achievements? Were his methods ever trustworthy? And what effects have his dogmas wrought not just on therapy but also on social attitudes, psychological research, academic discourse and public health?
Beginning around 1970, independent scholars such as Henri F Ellenberger, Frank Cioffi, and Paul Roazen began to chip away at the legendary Freud who had been canonised in the 1950s by Anna Freud, Ernest Jones, and others. The process has continued to this day. Freud, we now know, regularly lied about his breakthroughs, double-crossed benefactors, and slandered his rivals, and through ad hoc tinkering with a dubious theory, he created a great jumble of conflicting notions, bordering at times on mysticism.
Until fairly recently, the psychoanalytic community put up a united front against all such “Freud bashing”. Now, occasionally, we see Freud accurately depicted as a peremptory, undisciplined and power-hungry speculator – or, as he put it himself in a letter that his daughter suppressed, as “not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker” but just a headlong “conquistador”. Some honest Freudians even grant that Freud was a sick man who tried to saddle the whole human race with his anxious fantasies. But the necessary next step – to admit that psychoanalysis never had a sound raison d’être – isn’t taken, because to do so would deprive the Freudian authors of their worldview and, paradoxically, of their chosen technique for deconstructing Freud’s psyche.
The peril of trying to be specific about Freud without keeping up with the scholarship may be illustrated by your mention of one notion that ought to please me: “primary bisexuality”. I don’t think you have considered how Freud’s apprehension of that phenomenon differed from your own. More important, it wasn’t Freud’s idea at all. He lifted it directly from the wild theorising of his madcap friend Wilhelm Fliess.
SO: I am not such an ignorant person that I would lump Cioffi with Roazen and Ellenberger. Yes, Roazen revealed the Freud who fell out spectacularly with many colleagues, the Freud who analysed his daughter and so on, but he credits Freud with a seminal place in the history of the human mind, and documented his life and work in his many books.
Ellenberger demonstrated in 1970 that the notion of the “talking cure” and the revelation of the “pathogenic secret” have their roots in ancient time, and that far from detracting from Freud his work can thus be set in a wide historical context. He sees Freud as deserving pride of place for the work he undertook to conceptualise hidden secrets, repressed memories and the like in a systematic fashion, which then linked to a formalised method of treatment. Yes, Ellenberger discovered that Breuer’s case Anna O did not have a swift or straightforward recovery, but for him that didn’t invalidate psychoanalysis or Freud.
Nor does your accusation that the good ideas are simply other people’s ideas. Indeed, this is inevitable. Ideas are an outcome of time, place and connection. I’m not naively saying there is no envy, competition or theft in intellectual ideas, but I can’t go with the malevolent version.
Freud himself might have wryly remarked that it is the job of the next generation(s) to dismantle the work of the father, the progenitor, and yet for the work to still stand. And so it does. The listening/talking cure is alive and well and growing.
FC: Thanks, Susie, for your part in a civil dialogue. Not surprisingly, we haven’t changed each other’s minds. I hope, though, that some readers will have grasped why such differences are inevitable. So long as Freud is prized as an iconic leader who lent his blessing to one’s own therapeutic tradition, he is bound to remain at least partly veiled in myth.
The Freud who lived and breathed was by no means the progenitor of empathetic talk therapy. A better candidate for that honour would be the Swiss Paul Dubois, who addressed himself not to his patients’ supposed infantile memories or to their hothouse “transference” but to their here-and-now insecurity within their life situations. If Dubois remains in outer darkness today, it isn’t because he failed – all varieties of cognitive treatment are indebted to him – but because Freud bested him in the art of unrelenting gamesmanship and self-promotion.
Henri Ellenberger was no admirer of Freud’s; he regarded him as having stolen major credit from Pierre Janet. As Paul Roazen wrote, “The theme of plagiarism can be found almost everywhere one turns in Freud’s career.” This was a question not of occasional borrowing, and still less of openly shared endeavour, but of chronic dishonesty and the malicious sabotage of others’ reputations. Without such behaviour on Freud’s part, he might be as unknown today as the meritorious Paul Dubois.
Frederick Crews’s Freud: The Making of an Illusion is published by Profile Books, on 31 August (£30). Susie Orbach’s latest book, In Therapy, is published by Profile Books (£8.99). To order Crews’s book for £25.50, click here. To order Orbach’s for £7.64 click here or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion