On 10 May Paul Smith wrote in response to the question "Was Freud a scientist?" [snip]: > My take on the question is "It's a misleading question". What > matters, of course, is not whether or not a particular person is > a scientist, but that person's use of scientific methods when > claiming to demonstrate a particular claim.
I suspect that this is what people actually mean when they ask if Freud was a scientist. Paul wrote: > I personally don't really care that much whether or not Freud was > a scientist - I care about which of his claims are supported and > which are not. As a once-famous British philosopher, Dr Joad, used to say, it all depends on what you mean by "supported"! I think it is necessary to distinguish (albeit there is not always a sharp dividing line) between fundamental Freudian claims that require for validation "scientific" evidence of the kind I suspect Paul has in mind, and the everyday kind of contention that pervades psychoanalytic discourse and which is frequently not amenable to such evidence, and should be judged by the best standards of humanistic evidence such as pertains in history, biography, and so on. (Let me here acknowledge my indebtedness to numerous lengthy telephone conversations with Frank Cioffi on this topic on and off over several years.) Todd Nelson wrote [snip]: > Freud treated his ideas and theories as obvious truths that need no > verification by others (e.g. When one scientist sent Freud a report > of an experiment that supported Freud's notion of repression, Freud > wrote back to the scientist saying (paraphrasing here), "Thank you > for your report, but everyone knows that repression exists and to > conduct experiments to show it exists is a waste of time."). In reply to which Chris Green responded: > In any case, the example that Todd provides of a single letter > (written when? to whom?) hardly makes the general case. (Imagine if > someone attempt to dismiss *your* whole career by citing the last time > to "brushed off" an annoying stranger who e-mailed their "study" that > "proved" wrong something you had been working on your whole adult > life. Scott Lilienfeld has pointed out that the letter in question, from a supporter of psychoanalysis, Saul Rosenberg, was in no sense trying to dismiss Freud's work (quite the contrary), but the important thing to note here are the terms in which Freud downplayed the importance of experimental studies: "The wealth of dependable observations on which these assertions rest make them independent of experimental verification." This, of course, is a question-begging response, since the central issue in relation to psychoanalytic contentions is whether what Freud calls "observations" are in fact dependable. How reliable were Freud's clinical observation claims? One has to question, if not the "scientific" credentials, then the bona fides of someone who indicates that he will be publishing "the evidence needful to support my [clinical] assertions", the "actual material" of his current analyses, at a later date, but fails to do so [1896, SE 3, pp. 162, 203]. Worse, as Gay reports, Freud usually destroyed his patient files soon after he wrote them. This means that for the published case histories we don't have the opportunity of seeing the original case notes (which themselves have the serious drawback that even there we are only getting a second-hand report of what took place in the consulting room). Just how important this is from the point of view of disinterested inquiry is shown by the discrepancies between Breuer's original case notes (published in Albrecht Hirschmuller's biography [1989 (1978)]) and the case history of "Anna O." he published some thirteen years after the treatment in *Studies on Hysteria* (1995). Or, again, by the "intentional confabulation" and "serious discrepancies" between the original case notes and the published case history of the Rat Man that Patrick Mahony was able to uncover only because those case notes inexplicably survived. What has this to do with whether Freud was a scientist? It indicates just how much one is reliant on the good faith, and given that, the disinterestedness, of the analyst in assessing psychoanalytic reports purporting to clinically demonstrate psychoanalytic phenomena. This is why Cioffi argues that psychoanalysis is a "testimonial science" (arguably an oxymoron!) [Cioffi, 1998, pp. 32-34]. One indication of the non-scientific nature of Freudian contentions is that phenomena widely claimed to have been observed were later rejected by mainstream psychoanalysts without any explanation why earlier widely reported "observations" had been discarded. Unlike in a scientific discipline, no one came forward to report how the earlier claims had been refuted. Some of these appear to have been dropped for no other reason that they were no longer deemed socially appropriate. A classic example are the 'findings' claimed by Freud about female early childhood sexuality. When a few feminist psychoanalysts in the 1930s disputed some of these claims Freud's response was to argue that they had been insufficiently analyzed: not having recognized the phenomena in themselves, they were unable to find them in their patients [1940 (1938), SE 23, p. 197]. (This very same mode of argument was used by Robert Fliess in the 1970s to justify his contention � championed by Jeffrey Masson in *The Assault on Truth* � that repressed memories of physical and sexual abuse in early childhood were widespread among psychoanalytic patients, though unrecognized by analysts.) To cap it all, Freud insisted that psychoanalysts alone "can have any access whatsoever" to his findings pertaining to infantile sexuality, anyone else being precluded from "forming a judgment that is uninfluenced by their own dislikes and prejudices" [1905 [1920], SE 7, p. 133]. Leaving aside that elsewhere in his writings he both reiterates this view that his findings "can *only* be obtained by the method of analysis" of adults, and also, in contradiction, claims that these findings have been confirmed "fully and in every detail" by the "*direct* observations of children" [cited in Esterson, 1993, pp. 135-136, my emphases], one has to ask whether an appeal to such an exclusively esoteric mode of acquiring knowledge is compatible with the scientific outlook. References Cioffi, F. (1998). *Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience.* Open Court. Esterson, A. (1993). *Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud.* Open Court. 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.srmhp.org/0202/review-01.html --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
