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Sigmund Freud, physiologist, medical doctor, psychologist and father of psychoanalysis, is generally recognised as one of the most influential and authoritative thinkers of the twentieth century. Working initially in close collaboration with Joseph Breuer, Freud elaborated the theory that the mind is a complex energy-system, the structural investigation of which is proper province of psychology. He articulated and refined the concepts of the unconscious, of infantile sexuality, of repression, and proposed a tri-partite account of the mind's structure, all as part of a radically new conceptual and therapeutic frame of reference for the understanding of human psychological development and the treatment of abnormal mental conditions. Notwithstanding the multiple manifestations of psychoanalysis as it exists today, it can in almost all fundamental respects be traced directly back to Freud's original work. Further, Freud's innovative treatment of human actions, dreams, and indeed of cultural artefacts as invariably possessing implicit symbolic significance has proven to be extraordinarily fecund, and has had massive implications for a wide variety of fields, including anthropology, semiotics, and artistic creativity and appreciation in addition to psychology. However, Freud's most important and frequently re-iterated claim, that with psychoanalysis he had invented a new science of the mind, remains the subject of much critical debate and controversy. |
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Freud was born in Frieberg, Moravia in 1856, but when he was four
years old his family moved to Vienna, where Freud was to live and
work until the last year of his life. In 1937 the Nazis annexed
Austria, and Freud, who was Jewish, was allowed to leave for England.
For these reasons, it was above all with the city of Vienna that
Freud's name was destined to be deeply associated for posterity,
founding as he did what was to become known as the 'first Viennese
school' of psychoanalysis, from which, it is fair to say,
psychoanalysis as a movement and all subsequent developments in this
field flowed. The scope of Freud's interests, and of his professional
training, was very broad - he always considered himself first and
foremost a scientist, endeavouring to extend the compass of human
knowledge, and to this end (rather than to the practice of medicine)
he enrolled at the medical school at the University of Vienna in
1873. He concentrated initially on biology, doing research in
physiology for six years under the great German scientist Ernst
Brücke, who was director of the Physiology Laboratory at the
University, thereafter specialising in neurology. He received his
medical degree in 1881, and having become engaged to be married in
1882, he rather reluctantly took up more secure and financially
rewarding work as a doctor at Vienna General Hospital. Shortly after
his marriage in 1886 - which was extremely happy, and gave Freud six
children, the youngest of whom, Anna, was herself to become a
distinguished psychoanalyst - Freud set up a private practice in the
treatment of psychological disorders, which gave him much of the
clinical material on which he based his theories and his pioneering
techniques.
In 1885-86 Freud spent the greater part of a year in Paris, where he
was deeply impressed by the work of the French neurologist Jean
Charcot, who was at that time using hypnotism to treat hysteria and
other abnormal mental conditions. When he returned to Vienna, Freud
experimented with hypnosis, but found that its beneficial effects did
not last. At this point he decided to adopt instead a method
suggested by the work of an older Viennese colleague and friend,
Josef Breuer, who had discovered that when he encouraged a hysterical
patient to talk uninhibitedly about the earliest occurrences of the
symptoms, the latter sometimes gradually abated. Working with Breuer,
Freud formulated and developed the idea that many neuroses (phobias,
hysterical paralyses and pains, some forms of paranoia, etc.) had
their origins in deeply traumatic experiences which had occurred in
the past life of the patient but which were now forgotten, hidden
from consciousness; the treatment was to enable the patient to recall
the experience to consciousness, to confront it in a deep way both
intellectually and emotionally, and in thus discharging it, to remove
the underlying psychological causes of the neurotic symptoms. This
technique, and the theory from which it is derived, was given its
classical expression in Studies in Hysteria, jointly published
by Freud and Breuer in 1895.
Shortly thereafter, however, Breuer, found that he could not agree
with what he regarded as the excessive emphasis which Freud placed
upon the sexual origins and content of neuroses, and the two parted
company, with Freud continuing to work alone to develop and refine
the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. In 1900, after a
protracted period of self-analysis, he published The
Interpretation of Dreams, which is generally regarded as his
greatest work, and this was followed in 1901 by The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and in 1905 by Three Essays
on the Theory of Sexuality. Freud's psychoanalytic theory was
initially not well received - when its existence was acknowledged at
all it was usually by people who were, as Breuer had foreseen,
scandalised by the emphasis placed on sexuality by Freud - and it was
not until 1908, when the first International Psychoanalytical
Congress was held at Salzburg, that Freud's importance began to be
generally recognised. This was greatly facilitated in 1909, when he
was invited to give a course of lectures in the United States, which
were to form the basis of his 1916 book Five Lectures on
Psycho-Analysis. From this point on Freud's reputation and fame
grew enormously, and he continued to write prolifically until his
death, producing in all more than twenty volumes of theoretical works
and clinical studies. He was also not adverse to critically revising
his views, or to making fundamental alterations to his most basic
principles when he considered that the scientific evidence demanded
it - this was most clearly evidenced by his advancement of a
completely new tripartite (id, ego, and
super-ego) model of the mind in his 1923 work The Ego and
the Id. He was initially greatly heartened by attracting
followers of the intellectual calibre of Adler and Jung, and was
correspondingly disappointed personally when they both went on to
found rival schools of psychoanalysis - thus giving rise to the first
two of many schisms in the movement - but he knew that such
disagreement over basic principles had been part of the early
development of every new science. After a life of remarkable vigour
and creative productivity, he died of cancer while exiled in England
in 1939.
Although a highly original thinker, Freud was also deeply
influenced by a number diverse factors which overlapped and
interconnected with each other to shape the development of his
thought. As indicated above, both Charcot and Breuer had a direct and
immediate impact upon him, but some of the other factors, though no
less important than these, were of a rather different nature. First
of all, Freud himself was very much a Freudian - his father had two
sons by a previous marriage, Emmanuel and Philip, and the young Freud
often played with Philip's son John, who was his own age. Freud's own
self-analysis - which forms the core of his masterpiece The
Interpretation of Dreams - originated in the emotional crisis
which he suffered on the death of his father, and the series of
dreams to which this gave rise. This analysis revealed to him that
the love and admiration which he had felt for his father were mixed
with very contrasting feelings of shame and hate (such a mixed
attitude he termed 'ambivalence'). Particularly revealing was his
discovery that he had often fantasised as a youth that his
half-brother Philip (who was of an age with his mother) was really
his father, and certain other signs convinced him of the deep
underlying meaning of this fantasy - that he had wished his real
father dead, because he was his rival for his mother's affections.
This was to become the personal (though by no means exclusive) basis
for his theory of the Oedipus complex.
Secondly, and at a more general level, account must be taken of the
contemporary scientific climate in which Freud lived and worked. In
most respects, the towering scientific figure of nineteenth century
science was Charles Darwin, who had published his revolutionary
Origin of Species when Freud was four years old. The evolutionary
doctrine radically altered the prevailing conception of man - whereas
before man had been seen as a being different in nature to the
members of the animal kingdom by virtue of his possession of an
immortal soul, he was now seen as being part of the natural order,
different from non-human animals only in degree of structural
complexity. This made it possible and plausible, for the first time,
to treat man as an object of scientific investigation, and to
conceive of the vast and varied range of human behaviour, and the
motivational causes from which it springs, as being amenable in
principle to scientific explanation. Much of the creative work done
in a whole variety of diverse scientific fields over the next century
was to be inspired by, and derive sustenance from, this new
world-view, which Freud, with his enormous esteem for science,
accepted implicitly.
An even more important influence on Freud, however, came from the
field of physics. The second 50 years of the nineteenth century saw
monumental advances in contemporary physics, which were largely
initiated by the formulation of the principle of the conservation of
energy by Helmholz. This principle states, in effect, that the total
amount of energy in any given physical system is always constant,
that energy quanta can be changed but not annihilated, and
consequently that when energy is moved from one part of the system it
must reappear in another part. The progressive application of this
principle led to the monumental discoveries in the fields of
thermodynamics, electromagneticism, and nuclear physics which, with
their associated technologies, have so comprehensively transformed
the contemporary world. As we have seen, when he first came to the
University of Vienna Freud worked under the direction of Ernst
Brücke, who in 1874 published a book setting out the view that
all living organisms, including the human one, are essentially
energy-systems to which, no less than to inanimate objects, the
principle of the conservation of energy applies. Freud, who had great
admiration and respect for Brücke, quickly adopted this new
'dynamic physiology' with enthusiasm. From there it was but a short
conceptual step - but one which Freud was the first to take, and on
which his claim to fame is largely grounded - to the view that there
is such a thing as 'psychic energy', that the human
personality is also an energy-system, and that it is the
function of psychology to investigate the modifications,
transmissions, and conversions of 'psychic energy' within the
personality which shape and determine it. This latter conception is
the very cornerstone of Freud's psychoanalytic theory.
Freud's theory of the unconscious, then, is highly deterministic,
a fact which, given the nature of nineteenth century science, should
not be surprising. Freud was arguably the first thinker to apply
deterministic principles systematically to the sphere of the mental,
and to hold that the broad spectrum of human behaviour is explicable
only in terms of the (usually hidden) mental processes or states
which determine it. Thus, instead of treating the behaviour of the
neurotic as being causally inexplicable - which had been the
prevailing approach for centuries - Freud insisted, on the contrary,
on treating it as behaviour for which is meaningful to seek an
explanation by searching for causes in terms of the mental
states of the individual concerned. Hence the significance which he
attributed to slips of the tongue or pen, obsessive behaviour, and
dreams - all, he held, are determined by hidden causes in the
person's mind, and so they reveal in covert form what would otherwise
not be known at all. This suggests the view that freedom of the will
is, if not completely an illusion, certainly more tightly
circumscribed than is commonly believed, for it follows from this
that whenever we make a choice we are governed by hidden mental
processes of which we are unaware and over which we have no
control.
The postulate that there are such things as unconscious mental
states at all is a direct function of Freud's determinism, his
reasoning here being simply that the principle of causality
requires that such mental states should exist, for it is
evident that there is frequently nothing in the conscious mind which
can be said to cause neurotic or other behaviour. An 'unconscious'
mental process or event, for Freud, is not one which merely happens
to be out of consciousness at a given time, but is rather one which
cannot, except through protracted psychoanalysis, be brought
to the forefront of consciousness. The postulation of such
unconscious mental states entails, of course, that the mind is not,
and cannot be, identified with consciousness or that which can be an
object of consciousness - to employ a much-used analogy, it is rather
structurally akin to an iceberg, the bulk of it lying below the
surface, exerting a dynamic and determining influence upon the part
which is amenable to direct inspection, the conscious mind.
Deeply associated with this view of the mind is Freud's account of
the instincts or drives. The instincts, for Freud, are the principal
motivating forces in the mental realm, and as such they 'energise'
the mind in all of its functions. There are, he held, an indefinitely
large number of such instincts, but these can be reduced to a small
number of basic ones, which he grouped into two broad generic
categories, Eros (the life instinct), which covers all the
self-preserving and erotic instincts, and Thanatos (the death
instinct), which covers all the instincts towards aggression,
self-destruction, and cruelty. Thus it is a mistake to interpret
Freud as asserting that all human actions spring from
motivations which are sexual in their origin, since those which
derive from Thanatos are not sexually motivated - indeed, Thanatos is
the irrational urge to destroy the source of all sexual energy in the
annihilation of the self. Having said that, it is undeniably true
that Freud gave sexual drives an importance and centrality in human
life, human actions, and human behaviour which was new (and to many,
shocking), arguing as he does both that the sexual drives exist and
can be discerned in children from birth (the theory of infantile
sexuality), and that sexual energy (libido) is the single most
important motivating force in adult life. However, even here a
crucial qualification has to be added - Freud effectively redefined
the term 'sexuality' here to make it cover any form of
pleasure which is or can be derived from the body. Thus his
theory of the instincts or drives is essentially that the human being
is energised or driven from birth by the desire to acquire and
enhance bodily pleasure.
Freud's theory of infantile sexuality must be seen as an integral
part of a broader developmental theory of human personality. This had
its origins in, and was a generalisation of, Breuer's earlier
discovery that traumatic childhood events could have devastating
negative effects upon the adult individual, and took the form of the
general thesis that early childhood sexual experiences were the
crucial factors in the determination of the adult personality. From
his account of the instincts or drives it followed that from the
moment of birth the infant is driven in his actions by the desire for
bodily/sexual pleasure, where this is seen by Freud in almost
mechanical terms as the desire to release mental energy. Initially,
infants gain such release, and derive such pleasure, through the act
of sucking, and Freud accordingly terms this the 'oral' stage of
development. This is followed by a stage in which the locus of
pleasure or energy release is the anus, particularly in the act of
defecation, and this is accordingly termed the 'anal' stage. Then the
young child develops an interest in its sexual organs as a site of
pleasure (the 'phallic' stage), and develops a deep sexual attraction
for the parent of the opposite sex, and a hatred of the parent of the
same sex (the 'Oedipus complex'). This, however, gives rise to
(socially derived) feelings of guilt in the child, who recognises
that it can never supplant the stronger parent. In the case of a
male, it also puts the child at risk, which he perceives - if he
persists in pursuing the sexual attraction for his mother, he may be
harmed by the father; specifically, he comes to fear that he may be
castrated. This is termed 'castration anxiety'. Both the
attraction for the mother and the hatred are usually repressed, and
the child usually resolves the conflict of the Oedipus complex by
coming to identify with the parent of the same sex. This happens at
the age of five, whereupon the child enters a 'latency' period, in
which sexual motivations become much less pronounced. This lasts
until puberty, when mature genital development begins, and the
pleasure drive refocuses around the genital area.
This, Freud believed, is the sequence or progression implicit in
normal human development, and it is to be observed that at the
infant level the instinctual attempts to satisfy the pleasure drive
are frequently checked by parental control and social coercion. The
developmental process, then, is for the child essentially a movement
through a series of conflicts, the successful resolution of
which is crucial to adult mental health. Many mental illnesses,
particularly hysteria, Freud held, can be traced back to unresolved
conflicts experienced at this stage, or to events which otherwise
disrupt the normal pattern of infantile development. For example,
homosexuality is seen by some Freudians as resulting from a
failure to resolve the conflicts of the Oedipus complex, particularly
a failure to identify with the parent of the same sex; the obsessive
concern with washing and personal hygiene which characterises the
behaviour of some neurotics is seen as resulting from unresolved
conflicts/repressions occurring at the anal stage.
Neuroses and The Structure of the Mind
Freud's account of the unconscious, and the psychoanalytic therapy
associated with it, is best illustrated by his famous tripartite
model of the structure of the mind or personality (although, as we
have seen, he did not formulate this until 1923), which has many
points of similarity with the account of the mind offered by Plato
over 2,000 years earlier. The theory is termed 'tripartite' simply
because, again like Plato, Freud distinguished three structural
elements within the mind, which he called id, ego, and
super-ego. The id is that part of the mind in which are
situated the instinctual sexual drives which require satisfaction;
the super-ego is that part which contains the 'conscience',
viz. socially-acquired control mechanisms (usually imparted in the
first instance by the parents) which have been internalised; while
the ego is the conscious self created by the dynamic tensions
and interactions between the id and the super-ego,
which has the task of reconciling their conflicting demands with the
requirements of external reality. It is in this sense that the mind
is to be understood as a dynamic energy-system. All objects of
consciousness reside in the ego, the contents of the id
belong permanently to the unconscious mind, while the
super-ego is an unconscious screening-mechanism which seeks to
limit the blind pleasure-seeking drives of the id by the
imposition of restrictive rules. There is some debate as to how
literally Freud intended this model to be taken (he appears to have
taken it extremely literally himself), but it is important to note
that what is being offered here is indeed a theoretical model,
rather than a description of an observable object, which functions as
a frame of reference to explain the link between early childhood
experience and the mature adult (normal or dysfunctional)
personality.
Freud also followed Plato in his account of the nature of mental
health or psychological well-being, which he saw as the establishment
of a harmonious relationship between the three elements which
constitute the mind. If the external world offers no scope for the
satisfaction of the id's pleasure drives, or, more commonly,
if the satisfaction of some or all of these drives would indeed
transgress the moral sanctions laid down by the super-ego,
then an inner conflict occurs in the mind between its constituent
parts or elements - failure to resolve this can lead to later
neurosis. A key concept introduced here by Freud is that the mind
possesses a number of 'defence mechanisms' to attempt to prevent
conflicts from becoming too acute, such as repression (pushing
conflicts back into the unconscious), sublimation (channelling
the sexual drives into the achievement socially acceptable goals, in
art, science, poetry, etc.), fixation (the failure to progress
beyond one of the developmental stages), and regression (a
return to the behaviour characteristic of one of the stages).
Of these, repression is the most important, and Freud's account of
this is as follows: when a person experiences an instinctual impulse
to behave in a manner which the super-ego deems to be
reprehensible (e.g. a strong erotic impulse on the part of the child
towards the parent of the opposite sex), then it is possible for the
mind push it away, to repress it into the unconscious.
Repression is thus one of the central defence mechanisms by which the
ego seeks to avoid internal conflict and pain, and to reconcile
reality with the demands of both id and super-ego. As
such it is completely normal and an integral part of the
developmental process through which every child must pass on the way
to adulthood. However, the repressed instinctual drive, as an
energy-form, is not and cannot be destroyed when it is
repressed - it continues to exist intact in the unconscious, from
where it exerts a determining force upon the conscious mind, and can
give rise to the dysfunctional behaviour characteristic of neuroses.
This is one reason why dreams and slips of the tongue possess such a
strong symbolic significance for Freud, and why their analysis became
such a key part of his treatment - they represent instances in which
the vigilance of the super-ego is relaxed, and when the
repressed drives are accordingly able to present themselves to the
conscious mind in a transmuted form. The difference between 'normal'
repression and the kind of repression which results in neurotic
illness is one of degree, not of kind - the compulsive
behaviour of the neurotic is itself a behavioural manifestation of an
instinctual drive repressed in childhood. Such behavioural symptoms
are highly irrational (and may even be perceived as such by the
neurotic), but are completely beyond the control of the subject,
because they are driven by the now unconscious repressed impulse.
Freud positioned the key repressions, for both the normal individual
and the neurotic, in the first five years of childhood, and, of
course, held them to be essentially sexual in nature - as we have
seen, repressions which disrupt the process of infantile sexual
development in particular, he held, lead to a strong tendency to
later neurosis in adult life. The task of psychoanalysis as a therapy
is to find the repressions which are causing the neurotic symptoms by
delving into the unconscious mind of the subject, and by bringing
them to the forefront of consciousness, to allow the ego to confront
them directly and thus to discharge them.
Freud's account of the sexual genesis and nature of neuroses led
him naturally to develop a clinical treatment for treating such
disorders. This has become so influential today that when people
speak of 'psychoanalysis' they frequently refer exclusively to the
clinical treatment; however, the term properly designates both the
clinical treatment and the theory which underlies it. The aim of the
method may be stated simply in general terms - to re-establish a
harmonious relationship between the three elements which constitute
the mind by excavating and resolving unconscious repressed conflicts.
The actual method of treatment pioneered by Freud grew out of
Breuer's earlier discovery, mentioned above, that when a hysterical
patient was encouraged to talk freely about the earliest occurrences
of her symptoms and fantasies, the symptoms began to abate, and were
eliminated entirely she was induced to remember the initial trauma
which occasioned them. Turning away from his early attempts to
explore the unconscious through hypnosis, Freud further developed
this 'talking cure', acting on the assumption that the repressed
conflicts were buried in the deepest recesses of the unconscious
mind. Accordingly, he got his patients to relax in a position in
which they were deprived of strong sensory stimulation, even of keen
awareness of the presence of the analyst (hence the famous use of the
couch, with the analyst virtually silent and out of sight), and then
encouraged them to speak freely and uninhibitedly, preferably without
forethought, in the belief that he could thereby discern the
unconscious forces lying behind what was said. This is the method of
'free-association', the rationale for which is similar to that
involved in the analysis of dreams - in both cases the
super-ego is to some degree disarmed, its efficiency as a
screening mechanism is moderated, and material is allowed to filter
through to the conscious ego which would otherwise be
completely repressed. The process is necessarily a difficult and
protracted one, and it is therefore one of the primary tasks of the
analyst to help the patient to recognise, and to overcome, his own
natural resistances, which may exhibit themselves as hostility
towards the analyst. However, Freud always took the occurrence of
resistance as a sign that he was on the right track in his assessment
of the underlying unconscious causes of the patient's condition. The
patient's dreams are of particular interest, for reasons which we
have already partly seen. Taking it that the super-ego
functioned less effectively in sleep, as in free association, Freud
made a distinction between the manifest content of a dream
(what the dream appeared to be about on the surface) and its
latent content (the unconscious, repressed desires or wishes
which are its real object). The correct interpretation of the
patient's dreams, slips of tongue, free-associations, and responses
to carefully selected questions leads the analyst to a point where he
can locate the unconscious repressions producing the neurotic
symptoms, invariably in terms of the patient's passage through the
sexual developmental process, the manner in which the conflicts
implicit in this process were handled, and the libidinal content of
his family relationships. To effect a cure, he must facilitate the
patient himself to become conscious of unresolved conflicts buried in
the deep recesses of the unconscious mind, and to confront and engage
with them directly.
In this sense, then, the object of psychoanalytic treatment may be
said to be a form of self-understanding - once this is acquired, it
is largely up to the patient, in consultation with the analyst, to
determine how he shall handle this newly-acquired understanding of
the unconscious forces which motivate him. One possibility, mentioned
above, is the channelling of the sexual energy into the achievement
of social, artistic or scientific goals - this is sublimation, which
Freud saw as the motivating force behind most great cultural
achievements. Another would be the conscious, rational control of the
formerly repressed drives - this is suppression. Yet another would be
the decision that it is the super-ego, and the social
constraints which inform it, which are at fault, in which case the
patient may decide in the end to satisfy the instinctual drives. But
in all cases the cure is effected essentially by a kind of catharsis
or purgation - a release of the pent-up psychic energy, the
constriction of which was the basic cause of the neurotic
illness.
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It should be evident from the foregoing why psychoanalysis in
general, and Freud in particular, have exerted such a strong
influence upon the popular imagination in the Western World over the
past 90 years or so, and why both the theory and practice of
psychoanalysis should remain the object of a great deal of
controversy. In fact, the controversy which exists in relation to
Freud is more heated and multi-faceted than that relating to
virtually any other recent thinker (a possible exception being
Darwin), with criticisms ranging from the contention that Freud's
theory was generated by logical confusions arising out of his alleged
long-standing addiction to cocaine (Cf. Thornton, E.M. Freud and
Cocaine: The Freudian Fallacy) to the view that he made an
important, but grim, empirical discovery, which he knowingly
suppressed in favour of the theory of the unconscious, knowing that
the latter would be more acceptable socially (Cf. Masson, J. The
Assault on Truth).
It should be emphasised here that Freud's genius is not (generally)
in doubt, but the precise nature of his achievement is still the
source of much debate. The supporters and followers of Freud (and
Jung and Adler) are noted for the zeal and enthusiasm with which they
espouse the doctrines of the master, to the point where many of the
detractors of the movement see it as a kind of secular religion,
requiring as it does an initiation process in which the aspiring
psychoanalyst must himself first be analysed. In this way, it is
often alleged, the unquestioning acceptance of a set of ideological
principles becomes a necessary precondition for acceptance into the
movement - as with most religious groupings. In reply, the exponents
and supporters of psychoanalysis frequently analyse the motivations
of their critics in terms of the very theory which those critics
reject. And so the debate goes on.
Here we will confine ourselves to: (a) the evaluation of Freud's
claim that his theory is a scientific one, (b) the question of the
theory's coherence, (c) the dispute concerning what, if anything,
Freud really discovered, and (d) the question of the efficacy of
psychoanalysis as a treatment for neurotic illnesses.
(a) The Claim to Scientific Status
This is a crucially important issue, since Freud not alone saw
himself first and foremost as a pioneering scientist, but repeatedly
asserted that the significance of psychoanalysis is that it is a
new science, incorporating a new scientific method of dealing
with the mind and with mental illness. And there can be no doubt but
that this has been the chief attraction of the theory for most of its
advocates since then - on the face of it, it has the appearance of
being, not just a scientific theory, but an enormously strong
scientific theory, with the capacity to accommodate, and explain,
every possible form of human behaviour. However, it is precisely this
latter which, for many commentators, undermines its claim to
scientific status. On the question of what makes a theory a genuinely
scientific one, Karl Popper's criterion of demarcation, as it is
called, has now gained very general acceptance: viz. that every
genuine scientific theory must be testable, and therefore
falsifiable, at least in principle - in other words, if a
theory is incompatible with possible observations it is
scientific; conversely, a theory which is compatible with all
possible observations is unscientific (Cf. Popper, K. The Logic of
Scientific Discovery). Thus the principle of the conservation of
energy, which influenced Freud so greatly, is a scientific one,
because it is falsifiable - the discovery of a physical system in
which the total amount of energy was not constant would conclusively
show it to be false. And it is argued that nothing of the kind is
possible with respect to Freud's theory - if, in relation to it, the
question is asked: 'What does this theory imply which, if false,
would show the whole theory to be false?', the answer is 'nothing',
the theory is compatible with every possible state of affairs
- it cannot be falsified by anything, since it purports to explain
everything. Hence it is concluded that the theory is not scientific,
and while this does not, as some critics claim, rob it of all value,
it certainly diminishes its intellectual status, as that was and is
projected by its strongest advocates, including Freud himself.
(b) The Coherence of the Theory
A related (but perhaps more serious) point is that the coherence
of the theory is, at the very least, questionable. What is attractive
about the theory, even to the layman, is that it seems to offer us
long sought-after, and much needed, causal explanations
for conditions which have been a source of a great deal of human
misery. The thesis that neuroses are caused by unconscious conflicts
buried deep in the unconscious mind in the form of repressed
libidinal energy would appear to offer us, at last, an insight in the
causal mechanism underlying these abnormal psychological conditions
as they are expressed in human behaviour, and further show us how
they are related to the psychology of the 'normal' person. However,
even this is questionable, and is a matter of much dispute. In
general, when it is said that an event X causes another event Y to
happen, both X and Y are, and must be, independently
identifiable. It is true that this is not always a simple
process, as in science causes are sometimes unobservable (sub-atomic
particles, radio and electromagnetic waves, molecular structures,
etc.), but in these latter cases there are clear 'correspondence
rules' connecting the unobservable causes with observable phenomena.
The difficulty with Freud's theory is that it offers us entities
(repressed unconscious conflicts, for example) which are said to be
the unobservable causes of certain forms of behaviour, but there are
no correspondence rules for these alleged causes - they cannot
be identified except by reference to the behaviour which they
are said to cause (i.e. the analyst does not demonstratively assert:
'This is the unconscious cause, and that is its
behavioural effect'; he asserts: 'This is the behaviour,
therefore its unconscious cause must exist'). And this does
raise serious doubts as to whether Freud's theory offers us genuine
causal explanations at all.
At a less theoretical, but no less critical level, it has been
alleged that Freud did make a genuine discovery, which he was
initially prepared to reveal to the world, but the response which he
encountered was so ferociously hostile that he masked his findings,
and offered his theory of the unconscious in its place (Cf. Masson,
J. The Assault on Truth). What he discovered, it has been
suggested, was the extreme prevalence of child sexual abuse,
particularly of young girls (the vast majority of hysterics
are women), even in respectable nineteenth century Vienna. He did in
fact offer an early 'seduction theory' of neuroses, which met with
fierce animosity, and which he quickly withdrew, and replaced with
theory of the unconscious. As one contemporary Freudian commentator
explains it, Freud's change of mind on this issue came about as
follows:
Questions concerning the traumas suffered by his patients seemed to reveal [to Freud] that Viennese girls were extraordinarily often seduced in very early childhood by older male relatives; doubt about the actual occurrence of these seductions was soon replaced by certainty that it was descriptions about childhood fantasy that were being offered. (MacIntyre).
In this way, it is suggested, the theory of the Oedipus complex was
generated.
This statement begs a number of questions, not least, what does the
expression 'extraordinarily often' mean in this context? By what
standard is this being judged? The answer can only be: by the
standard of what we generally believe - or would like to believe - to
be the case. But the contention of some of Freud's critics here is
that his patients were not recalling childhood fantasies, but
traumatic events in their childhood which were all too real,
and that he had stumbled upon, and knowingly suppressed, the fact
that the level of child sexual abuse in society is much higher than
is generally believed or acknowledged. If this contention is true -
and it must at least be contemplated seriously - then this is
undoubtedly the most serious criticism that Freud and his followers
have to face.
Further, this particular point has taken on an added, and even more
controversial significance in recent years with the willingness of
some contemporary Freudians to combine the theory of
repression with an acceptance of the wide-spread social
prevalence of child sexual abuse. The result has been that, in the
United States and Britain in particular, many thousands of people
have emerged from analysis with 'recovered memories' of alleged
childhood sexual abuse by their parents, memories which, it is
suggested, were hitherto repressed. On this basis, parents have been
accused and repudiated, and whole families divided or destroyed.
Unsurprisingly, this in turn has given rise to a systematic backlash,
in which organisations of accused parents, seeing themselves as the
true victims of what they term 'False Memory Syndrome', have
denounced all such memory-claims as falsidical, the direct product of
a belief in what they see as the myth of repression. (Cf. Pendergast,
M. Victims of Memory). In this way, the concept of repression,
which Freud himself termed 'the foundation stone upon which the
structure of psychoanalysis rests', has come in for more widespread
critical scrutiny than ever before. Here, the fact that, unlike some
of his contemporary followers, Freud did not himself ever countenance
the extension of the concept of repression to cover actual child
sexual abuse, and the fact that we are not necessarily forced to
choose between the views that all 'recovered memories' are either
veridical or falsidical, are, perhaps understandably, frequently lost
sight of in the extreme heat generated by this debate.
(d) The Efficacy of Psychoanalytic Therapy
It does not follow that, if Freud's theory is unscientific, or
even false, it cannot provide us with a basis for the beneficial
treatment of neurotic illness, because the relationship between a
theory's truth or falsity and its utility-value is far from being an
isomorphic one. (The theory upon which the use of leeches to bleed
patients in eighteenth century medicine was based was quite spurious,
but patients did sometimes actually benefit from the treatment!). And
of course even a true theory might be badly applied, leading to
negative consequences. One of the problems here is that it is
difficult to specify what counts as a cure for a neurotic
illness, as distinct, say, from a mere alleviation of the symptoms.
In general, however, the efficiency of a given method of treatment is
usually clinically measured by means of a 'control group' - the
proportion of patients suffering from a given disorder who are cured
by treatment X is measured by comparison with those cured by other
treatments, or by no treatment at all. Such clinical tests as have
been conducted indicate that the proportion of patients who have
benefited from psychoanalytic treatment does not diverge
significantly from the proportion who recover spontaneously or as a
result of other forms of intervention in the control groups used. So
the question of the therapeutic effectiveness of psychoanalysis
remains an open and controversial one.
Suggestions for Further Reading
WORKS BY FREUD:
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Ed. J. Strachey with Anna Freud), 24 vols . London: 1953-1964.
WORKS ON FREUD:
Bettlelheim, B. Freud and Man's Soul. Knopf, 1982.
Cavell, M. The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to Philosophy. Harvard University Press, 1993.
Chessick, R.D. Freud Teaches Psychotherapy. Hackett Publishing Company, 1980.
Cioffi, F. (ed.) Freud: Modern Judgements. Macmillan, 1973.
Dilman, I. Freud and the Mind. Blackwell, 1984.
Edelson, M. Hypothesis and Evidence in Psychoanalysis. University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Fancher, R. Psychoanalytic Psychology: The Development of Freud's Thought. Norton, 1973.
Farrell, B.A. The Standing of Psychoanalysis. Oxford University Press, 1981.
Freeman, L. The Story of Anna O. - The Woman who led Freud to Psychoanalysis. Paragon House, 1990.
Frosh, S. The Politics of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to Freudian and Post-Freudian Theory. Yale University Press, 1987.
Grünbaum, A. The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique. University of California Press, 1984.
Hook, S. (ed.) Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method, and Philosophy. New York University Press, 1959.
Jones, E. Sigmund Freud: Life and Work (3 vols), Basic Books, 1953-1957.
Klein, G.S. Psychoanalytic Theory: An Exploration of Essentials. International Universities Press, 1976.
MacIntyre, A.C. The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958.
-------- Freud. Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 3 (ed. P. Edwards). Collier Macmillan, 1967.
Mackay, N. Motivation and Explanation: An Essay on Freud's Philosophy of Science. International Universities Press, 1989.
Masson, J. The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory. Faber & Faber, 1984.
Popper, K. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Hutchinson, 1959.
Pendergast, M. Victims of Memory. HarperCollins, 1997.
Reiser, M. Mind, Brain, Body: Towards a Convergence of Psychoanalysis and Neurobiology. Basic Books, 1984.
Ricoeur, P. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation (trans. D. Savage). Yale University Press, 1970.
Schafer, R. A New Language for Psychoanalysis. Yale University Press, 1976.
Sherwood, M. The Logic of Explanation in Psychoanalysis. Academic Press, 1969.
Stewart, W. Psychoanalysis: The First Ten Years, 1888-1898. Macmillan, 1969.
Sulloway, F. Freud, Biologist of the Mind. Basic Books, 1979.
Thornton, E.M. Freud and Cocaine: The Freudian Fallacy. Blond & Briggs, 1983.
Wallace, E.R. Freud and Anthropology: A History and Reappraisal. International Universities Press, 1983.
Whyte, L.L. The Unconscious Before Freud. Basic Books, 1960.
Wollheim, R. Freud. Fontana, 1971.
-------- (ed.) Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays. Anchor, 1974.
-------- & Hopkins, J. (eds.) Philosophical Essays on Freud. Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Other Internet Resources
- Vienna, Austria: Information about Sigmund Freud.
- From the Freud Archives: The latest information on the Rescheduled Freud Show, direct from the Library of Congress
- The Sigmund Freud Museum
- Freud as Collector
- Freud Pilot Project at the Center for Electronic Text in the Humanities.
- Sigmund Freud and the Freud Archives
- Marc Fonda's Freud Page
Dr. Stephen P. Thornton
Email: thornton@iol.ie
© 2001