At 08:35 AM 2/15/99 L. Proyect wrote:
>
>Actually, Marx is taken much more seriously than Freud nowadays. Freud as
>"scientist" has absolutely no authority. All of the main tenets he stressed
>(repressed memories in particular) have been demolished by real scientists.
>....
>
Perhaps Proyect will inform us of his academic authority to write, sans
qualifiers, that Freud has "absolutely no authority." One is also
scientifically curious what "real scientists" refuted repressed memories
and the academic journals where they published.
> .... Psychoanalysis has very limited value in
>explaining how people behave. For example, when psychoanalysts write about
>fascism, they usually go off on the most ridiculous tangents about sexual
>attitudes of the German masses, or Hitler's psychopathology in particular.
>....
>
I consider myself a rather orthodox Freudian. And as the editor of The
Internet Anti-Fascist I do not recognize either myself or my journal in
Proyect's assertions.
>
>The real problem with psychotherapy in the past is that it was promoted as
>a cure for all sorts of problems that were clearly organic in nature, from
>obsessive-compulsive disorders to schizophrenia. The notion that the
>oedipal complex could have anything to do with hearing voices in your head
>is not only absurd, it is patently unscientific.
>
The mere fact that some therapists may have promoted it as Proyect writes
does not mean that all did; he confuses the part with the whole.
I am also unclear about the "clearly organic ... nature" of the diseases
about which Proyect writes. One may attribute some organic quality to them,
but only due to very "unclear" statistics and research. Nor does locating
an organic aspect disprove the existence of non-organic factors.
Drunkenness is clearly organic, yet all of us know that the common organic
state leads to fundamental differences in drunken behavior by different
people with different psychologies.
And, despite Proyect's assertions, the Oedipal Complex was not the core of
Freud's theories of schizophrenia. Scientific studies of Freud's theories
in this area have demonstrated some correlations where p < .01.
Proyect seems to reflect a particular mainstream psychologism that I've
seen in other Marxists. They have no problem challenging the
middle-of-the-road or common-sense notions of history, economics, or
political science. But in psychology they cling to the path of our
mainstream culture and mainstream biases.
Even the piece by Frederick Crew, Proyect's anti-Freudian expert, does
little more than assert sans proof that Freud is unscientific. This method
is easy to use and demonstrates nothing, to wit: "Scientists now concede
that the existence of the moon is just a myth."
In closing, let me mention another common error that makes a rational study
of Freud sometimes difficult. While we speak of "psychoanalysis" as a
single entity, we need to remember that it is composed of many theories.
Each may be valid or invalid, largely independent of the others.
-- tallpaul
editor/publisher: The Internet Anti-Fascist
