On 10 May David Gent wrote [snip]: > I am always interested by the strength of anti-freudian > feeling sometimes elicited when his name is mentioned > in these pages - though not in this thread I hasten to add. > And I feel personally that it is essential to cover Freud > in basic psychology courses because of historical importance > of the theory and it's offspring...
I’m not sure what David means by anti-Freudian “feeling”. It almost makes it seem that anti-Freudian comments are a matter of preference, rather than the result of rational consideration of the evidence. If some anti-Freud literature may occasionally be strident (and this is certainly the case, especially in popular newspaper articles), part of the reason may be that no amount of documentation of the actual facts about Freud’s life and work, and his place among his contemporaries, seems to impinge greatly on some of the misleading accounts still routinely presented as received history. (See my comments on Solms' Scientific American article: http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=57) While I agree that Freud should be “covered” in basic psychology, the problem is that a lot of mythological stories are presented in College psychology texts about the origins and development of psychoanalysis and about Freud’s case histories. For instance, College texts typically describe the Anna O. case and Freud’s own early cases as exemplifying that Breuer and Freud uncovered the problems, usually sexual, at the root of patients’ symptoms, resulting in the remission of the symptoms. Those TIPSters who have read the article I posted at on Butterflies and Wheels (http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=58) will appreciate that such time-honoured general accounts, based on Freud’s misleading retrospective accounts, bear only a passing resemblance to the true facts ascertainable by close reading of the original documents. Who would know, for instance, from the traditional stories of the early days of psychoanalysis, that Freud wrote in his account of his clinical methodology in 1895 that in the later stages “it is of use if we can guess the way things are connected up and tell the patient before we have uncovered it”, or that “the principal point is that I should guess the secret and tell the patient straight out”? As is evident in the Elisabeth von R. case, Freud did precisely that, though almost all accounts of that case report erroneously that the treatment led Elisabeth herself to bring to consciousness her supposed unconscious love for her brother-in-law, thereby relieving her symptoms. Similarly, who doesn’t ‘know’ that most of Freud’s early female patients reported that they had been sexually abused in childhood, usually by their fathers? Yet, as I document in the aforementioned article, the alleged sexual abuse memories were unconscious, and were analytically ‘uncovered’ (in accordance with Freud’s preconceived seduction theory) from the ages of two and three, or even one. Would his claims be treated as historical fact it this were more widely known? Furthermore, according to Freud in 1896 (in contrast to what he was to write in later accounts), the patients told Freud of their "unbelief" in the supposed infantile occurrences. Yet most psychology texts, at least until very recently, recycled Freud’s false story in “New Introductory Lectures” (1933) that most of his female patients “told” him they had been “seduced” by their father in early childhood, and this is the account recycled by innumerable authors throughout the second half of the twentieth century. This false story serves as the basis for both the traditional story of Freud’s supposed discovery of infantile sexual fantasies, and of the feminist/Massonite revised version of the episode. For an account based on the documents of the time, rather than Freud’s misleading later accounts, see http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=10 Space considerations prevent me from dealing with other misconceptions typically presented in College psychology texts. But, summing up, sure, Freud’s clinical experiences and theories are of historical importance, if only because of the extraordinary influence they had, but it is high time that the scholarship of recent decades demonstrating that much of the earlier presentation of this material was based on misleading psychoanalytic sources made an impact in College texts. > Dr Professor Anthony Claire was for a time the best known > media psychiatrist in Britain and was a main contributer to > a radio documentary about Freud celebrating some anniversary > or other in the 1990s (I think). Asked what he thought the main > contribution of Freud has been to pychiatry he replied - as a > definite non-freudian - "He made us listen to our patients." Dr > Claire's radio series "In the Psychiatrist's Chair" was excellent. I can’t comment on these specific remarks, as I don’t know the context, but knowing Anthony Clare's views, and the probable programme (an Open University portrait of Freud), I would guess his opinions were edited. TIPSters will get a better idea of Clare’s assessment of Freud from the review of a biography of Freud published in 1997 that I have copied below. As you’ll see, it is very different from the vaguely benign view implied by the quoted words. Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.human-nature.com/esterson/index.html ----------------------------------------- Sunday Times 16 November 1997 That Shrinking Feeling Dr Freud: A Life By Paul Ferris Anthony Clare It is difficult to know quite why there is yet another biography of Freud. It is not as if he has been neglected. Among the dozens of biographical studies, we have had undiluted hagiography in the shape of Ernest Jones's *The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud*, a substantial and critical evaluation, *Freud: Biologist of the Mind* by Frank Sulloway, a skilful if ultimately unconvincing salvage operation by Peter Gay, *Freud: A Life For Our Time*, and a massive, mainly descriptive *Freud: The Man and the Cause* by Ronald Clark. Paul Ferris's justification for writing yet another is that while Freud's character, methods, claims and ambitions have indeed been substantially revised downwards in recent years, he finds himself more sympathetic to the flawed Freud than the traditional figure. So his biography pretends to a certain rugged realism but, in the final analysis, flinches from the portrayal of Freud as a ruthless, devious charlatan that more resolute, remorseless and unyielding critics insist on painting. He concludes, lamely, that, whatever the facts, Freud is what you want him to be, and Ferris wants him to be ‘a prophet, breathing life into the century through his prophecies’. That really will not do. In the sizeable and growing revisionist analysis of Freud and the Freudian culture, a number of truly formidable criticisms have been developed. Consider the argument advanced most cogently by Frank Cioffi and, more recently, Allen Esterson, to the effect that many of the foundation stones of psychoanalysis are phony. One that is of particular interest, given the current controversy over child sexual abuse and so-called false-memory syndrome, is Freud's seduction theory. The myth, pro-pounded by Freudians, is that Freud proposed the seduction theory as a result of hearing frequent reports from his female patients that they had been sexually abused in childhood. A second myth is that, in the early days of psychoanalysis, Freud's medical colleagues took such exception to his theories of infantile sexuality that they professionally ostracised him. The third myth is that Freud abandoned his seduction theory in response to this con-certed opposition of his medical colleagues. An unlikely coalition of feminists and Jeffrey Masson has savaged Freud for betraying his abused patients by losing his nerve and abandoning under pressure his radical insights into sexual abuse. The facts, we now know, are utterly different. Freud's female patients did not tell him they had been sexually abused in childhood. It was not a case of recollections emerging in the setting of a dispassionate, painstaking and neutral enquiry. Freud himself made it plain that the 'memories' that he elicited were in his view 'unconscious', only emerging after immense suggestion and pressure on his part and, more often than not, they did so as reconstructions based on fragmentary ideas and images, and not on memory as such. Indeed, in the course of responding to the rhetorical objection that he may have been deceived by hysterical confabulations, Freud himself insisted that 'before they come for analysis the patients know nothing about these [sexual] scenes. They are indignant as a rule if we warn them that such scenes are going to emerge. Only the strongest compulsion can induce them to embark on a reproduction of them'. This was the highly questionable basis of. the procedure that Freud was soon to describe as 'psychoanalysis'. This was the basis, too, of how he worked in the course of his most famous cases from 'Anna O' to the 'Wolf Man'. Ferris knows all of this and more. For example, no biographer can ignore the Dora case, given the prominence Freud himself and a legion of his followers gave it in the history of psychoanalysis, and Ferris provides a characteristically workmanlike account. But it is a cop-out of a truly lamentable kind to describe this farrago of fiction, fantasy and incompetence as 'a brilliant concoction of fact and surmise that transcends its subject'. The transcended subject, lest one forget, was a real 16 year-old girl, not some fictional Cordelia whose views, opinions and assertions were systematically twisted, reinvented and manipulated by Freud in a manner so coldblooded and cynical it still beggars belief. How does Ferris handle this? He doesn't. He describes Freud's antics in a wry, would--you-believe, he-was-such-an-enthusiast sort of way, blandly acknowledging the dubious interrogatory procedures, yet remaining bliss-fully indifferent to their monumental implications for the whole process of psychoanalysis. For Freud, the realisation that his infantile seduction claims were mistaken did not cause him to reflect that perhaps his newly developed psychoanalytic techniques used in establishing them were flawed. Rather, he decided that what he had supposedly uncovered were unconscious *fantasies* of seduction. Psycho-analysis chuntered on, even more difficult to disprove than before. Ferris chunters on, too, not one whit dismayed by the spurious assertions, questionable assumptions and downright erroneous dogma that the whole Freudian enterprise accumulated in Freud's lifetime. After the dogged reconstruction of the true life and times of Sigmund Freud undertaken by the redoubtable Peter Swales, and the shattering reassessment made by Allen Esterson in his magnificent attack on Freud's methodology, *Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud*, I doubt that there is any justification for another traditional biography of Freud. Freud's case histories were, for the most part, romantic fiction not clinical fact. The implications for psychiatry, medicine and intellectual life in general are simply too great to be set aside in the interests of a good read. Freud did that with his patients. In this biographical case study, Ferris has done it with Freud. Anthony Clare is clinical professor of psychiatry at Trinity College, Dublin --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
