A response to Aubyn Fulton's thought-provoking (for me!) comments on 18 October: > I have found Dr. Easterson's periodic comments about Freud to this list > to be interesting and informative - but I often feel like I have walked in > late to a symposium or a debate. This feeling has not diminished even after > monitoring this list for some time now. > > I wonder what is the context for your comments? I know there are pockets > of Freudology out there (old school psychiatry, perhaps some > unreconstructed English or History or Anthropology Departments, some > professional therapeutic communities) but I have not seen much of this > within academic psychology per se. I have been trained as a clinician, > and teach Personality, Principles of Counseling and History & Systems (among > other courses). In my experience Freud has never been much more than a > marginal figure within American academic psychology - and barely more than > that within most currents of American clinical psychology. Yet your comments > seem almost to suggest that you see yourself fighting against a compact > majority that uncritically accepts and almost worships at the Freudian alter. > Am I reading you incorrectly, or do you live in some psychological > neighborhood unknown to me in which Freud reigns supreme?
And on 19 October, in response to Riki Koenig, Aubyn wrote: > My sense also is that, while Freud and Freud-like theories have played a > larger role in Clinical Psychology, even here there has long been (for > longer than 15 years at least) a strong current within Clinical Psychology > that has been quite critical of Freud. Even in Manhattan in the 1970s I > would be surprised if there were many Clinical Psychologists who were not > aware of many of the criticisms of Freud, and who had not learned to at > least be somewhat cautious in citing Freud as an authority. Indeed, just > about every approach to psychotherapy developed since WWII begins with a > preamble explaining why Freud was wrong, or at least not right enough... >I am not part of the "Freud is Dead" (Or should be killed) school - in >fact I describe myself as, in part, something of a Neo-Freudian. I just >don't think there has ever really been a time when American Academic >Psychology (which can justly be accused of many sins) could validly be >accused of having fallen under the sway of blind Freudian orthodoxy. No one argues that Freud remains influential in current academic psychology or academic clinical psychology. But I think a check on the historical record will show that Aubyn is mistaken when he writes (18 Oct) that Freud has never been much more than a marginal figure in most currents of American clinical psychology. In *A History of Psychiatry* (1997) Edward Shorter recounts how psychoanalysts were dominant in most prominent departments of psychiatry in the US in the two decades after WW2. Nathan Hale has a chapter called "The Rise of a Psychoanalytic Psychiatry, 1945-1965" in his book *The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States* (1995) in which he details how Freudian ideas prospered mightily in academic psychiatry in those decades. (Hale dates the start of the decline from 1965, when he reports that the percentage of UCLA psychiatric residents in training at psychoanalytic institutes was 50 percent.) Coming back to the present, outside of psychology I suspect (from my general reading of reviews and articles, in journals such as THES, etc) that Aubyn greatly underestimates the influence of psychoanalytic ideas stemming directly from Freud in anthropological and other humanistic faculties, both in the US and the UK. Aubyn wrote: > �Yet your comments > seem almost to suggest that you see yourself fighting against a compact > majority that uncritically accepts and almost worships at the Freudian alter. Apologies if that is how I come across, but that is not how I see my TIPS contributions on Freud. I appreciate that the majority of TIPSters probably do not have a favourable view of Freudian theories. But in my experience even people unsympathetic to Freudian notions do not appreciate just how much of the story of psychoanalysis that became received history in Western culture is either wholly or largely false. Insofar as I have a "mission" in relation to my contributions on Freud it is disabuse people of some of the false notions that are commonplace among educated people, including those who are not sympathetic towards his ideas. To take one example: I would hazard a guess that before I submitted items on the seduction theory episode most TIPSters believed (and possibly still do, for all I know!) that many of Freud's early female patients (i.e., in the 1890s) told him that they had been sexually abused in childhood, mostly by their fathers. I would further hazard the guess that many TIPSters, on first coming across Jeffrey Masson's allegations that when Freud disowned his previous claims in favour of a theory of patients' fantasising he had engaged in a cover-up of widespread sexual abuse among his middle-class contemporaries, opted for the cover-up version of events. It is still (from my experience) very much a minority view that neither the "official" account, nor Masson�s revised version, is true, and that both of them are based on erroneous clinical claims made by Freud in 1896, as can be demonstrated by returning to the original documents rather than to Freud's grossly misleading retrospective accounts. It is noteworthy that the highly respected medical historian, Roy Porter, has a section on the seduction theory in his recent book *Madness: A Brief History* (Oxford University Press, 2002) in which he allows for only two possibilities, the official Freudian version or that associated with Masson's name. Mainstream psychology books are still, to a considerable extent, recycling received history when it comes to Freud. TIPSters may have read reviews this year of Richard Panek's *The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes* (Viking Press, 2004). Panek describes Freud's pioneering work as follows: "Only be tracing [the traumatic memory] to its source would doctor and patient see the hysterical symptom disappear�As Freud told a meeting of the Vienna Medical Club in January 1893, 'The moment at which the physician finds out the occasion when the symptom first appeared and the reason for its appearance is also the moment at which the symptom vanishes.' " Lovely story, but essentially a fairy tale version of events. But it is perpetuated happily by Panek in a book that has been generally well received by reviewers. But we don't have to turn to popular works to see that the traditional stories are alive and well. On 15 March 2000 the august journal *Nature* published an article by Martin Conway, professor of psychology in the Dept of Experimental Psychology, University of Bristol. It was titled "Repression Revisited", and in the first paragraph Conway wrote: "Freud provided many examples of memory repression from clinical cases, and documented its effects in day-to-day behaviour." For the evidence for this he references Freud's paper "Repression" (1915). Yet the specific examples of repression Freud gives in that paper don't bear critical analysis, as I demonstrate in the case of his first example, in the section "Freud's Concept of Repression" in my article *Freud's Theories of Repression and Memory*, Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice, vol 2 (2), 2003. See: http://www.psychiatrie-und-ethik.de/infc/1_gesamt_en.html (Esterson vs. Mollon link) Conway is an eminent researcher in the field of memory, yet he takes on board Freud's highly dubious clinical claims, no doubt largely on the basis of Freud's superficially compelling general accounts in which he constantly assures his readers that "psychoanalysis has shown" this, or "clinical observation (or experience) shows" that. (I can't believe Conway would swallow the absurdities of Freud's first example of the mechanism of repression, taken from the Wolf Man case history, if he had taken the trouble to read it directly in the case history rather than accept Freud's brief sketch in the 1915 paper. But who knows? And if he is basing his assertion largely on Freud's more well-known case reports in *Studies on Hysteria* he is exhibiting credulity to a degree unworthy of a professor of psychology.) Books perpetuating the traditional accounts have continued to come off the presses in recent years. Mollon's down-the-line Freudian tract *Freud and False Memory Syndrome* (Totem Books in the US) has been very much in evidence in mainstream bookstores in the UK, and I understand the same is the case in the US. I recently came across another, equally strictly party-line, book by Mollon, *The Unconscious* (2000), in a series called "Ideas in Psychoanalysis" (same publishers). Judging by the titles of the other volumes in the series I'd be very surprised if didn't all adhere strictly to Freudian orthodoxy, though one would hope that they may at least give an inkling of critical writings, something notably lacking in Mollon's account of Freud's notions of the dynamic unconscious. This continuing perpetuating of ideas that have been long undermined by critical analysis adds to my motivation for posting items concerning different aspects of Freudian theory and practice on TIPS. On top of this, a new series of all Freud's major works in new translations is in the course of being published by Penguin Books, and individual volumes are receiving positive reviews in the broadsheet press in the UK as they come out. In the UK any programmes dealing with Freud's ideas that go out on Radio 3 and Radio 4 (the stations most listened to by the relatively more highly educated public) are almost invariably dominated by pro-Freud commentators, generally without the presence of a critic. That the situation is not entirely different in the US is indicated by the fact that the PBS TV series a couple of years back called "Young Dr Freud" gave a down-the-line orthodox version of Freud's early career. It took four lengthy postings from yours truly to spell out the long list of errors and misrepresentations in the programme, but how many TIPSters would have recognized there was anything much wrong with the story as presented had I not done so? One last point. If those TIPSters who teach courses that include a section on Freud are asked by students which biography would the teacher recommend, what would you say? My guess is that a fair proportion would nominate Peter Gay's *Freud: A Life for Our Time*. I've just been perusing it in the course of checking some items for a referee review of a proposed article and been reminded just how misleading it is, especially in the earlier chapters purporting to give an historical account of Freud's experiences up to age 50. Freud could not have a more loyal purveyor of his fairy tale version of how our hero makes extraordinary discoveries and overcomes great odds to achieve well-justified fame for his epoch-making revelations about the human mind. Judging by standard college psychology texts, I would guess that this book is widely recommended in undergraduate psychology departments, ensuring that an appreciable proportion of college psychology students are still being fed the largely fictional stories. Sorry to go on so long, but it was impossible to respond adequately to Aubyn's query in a short space. P.S. A dread confession. I do not possess a doctorate, so I'm just plain "mister". Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.human-nature.com/esterson/index.html http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=10 http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=57 http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=58 http://www.psychiatrie-und-ethik.de/infc/1_gesamt_en.html --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
