On 29 November 2008, Rob Weisskirch wrote@ > Also, I think that discussing Freud helps to bridge towards other > "theories." Surely, we wouldn't have Attachment Theory, Piagetian > theories, even maybe Behaviorism as a counter to Freudian ideas
I'm astonished at this statement of Rob's. I think it is the result of another of the influences of the Freud myth - that all was dark in psychology/psychotherapy until Freud came along. Here is a quote from a press release from the American Psychoanalytic Association in 1999, the anniversary of the publication of *The Interpretation of Dreams* (from "Science Daily" - "Your source for the latest research news"): >The book's publication also marked the real beginnings of scientific research into the mind and to the development of truer understanding of mental health problems. >Because of its influence on scientific thinking, *The Interpretation of Dreams* has led to everything from drug treatments for depression and schizophrenia, to studies of neural networks with PET scans, and to further understanding of learning, memory, and mental development. [...] >Without the Interpretation of Dreams... psychology might still be the study ill humors and their effects on the brain. Without *The Interpretation of Dreams* modern, scientific study might not be finding the insights into the mind that are saving millions from the horrors of mental illness.< http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/09/990914081827.htm "Without [Freud] psychology might still be the study of ill humors." Ye gods. They're talking about the nineteenth century, a century overflowing with ideas and theories in psychology (as in all scientific spheres), and with developing clinical practice in psychotherapy. It just goes to show you can trust a statement from the American Psychoanalytic Association no more than one from the Master himself. (Try reading "The Myth of the Hero" - almost all originating from Freud himself - in Frank Sulloway's *Freud: Biologist of the Mind*, pp. 445-489.) For an antidote to such nonsense, take a glance at the first 400 pages of Henri Ellenberger's monumental *The Discovery of the Unconscious*, the early chapters of Edward Shorter's *A History of Psychiatry*, the chapter "The Growth of the Concept of Unconscious Cerebration before 1890" in Mark Altschule's *Roots of Modern Psychiatry* (pp. 56-83), or, for an overview of American psychotherapy before Freud's influence took hold, Eric Caplan's *Mind Games: American Culture and the Birth of Psychotherapy*. > Teaching about Freud is also a lesson in critical thinking. If students > learn about the origins of his theories, I hope that they become more > critical consumers of information. So where do they get to learn about the origins of his theories? Typically, psychology texts that deal with this have said something like: When Freud set up in private practice, he found that as he encouraged his (predominantly female) patients to talk about their life histories, their symptoms seemed to be related to experiences (often sexual) that they had forgotten about (i.e., repressed). As they came to recall these experiences, the symptoms frequently disappeared. Let's leave aside that he originally set up practice as a *neurologist* in the late 1880s, and that almost certainly many of these patients experienced neurological or physiological symptoms that Freud diagnosed as "hysteria" (e.g., "Elisabeth von R." in *Studies on Hysteria*). As early as 1889 he had decided that "conditions related functionally to sexual life play a great part in the aetiology of hysteria (as of all neuroses)". [SE 1, p. 51] Influenced by the reports of the method of treatment of "Anna O." given him by Breuer in 1883-84 (though Breuer *excluded* sexuality as a factor), Freud sought to uncover unconscious ideas or memories of a sexual nature, and his procedure as described in *Studies on Hysteria* (1895) includes the following: "It is [essential] that we should have more or less divined the nature of the case and the motives of the defence operating in it, and fortunately the technique of insistence and pressure [don't ask! - A.E.] takes us as far as this." "In these later stages it is of use if we can guess the way in which things are connected up and tell the patient before we have uncovered it." And from "Studies on Hysteria" (1896), in the seduction theory period: "Before they come for analysis the patients know nothing of these [infantile sexual] scenes. They are indignant as a rule if we warn them that such scenes are going to emerge. Only the strongest compulsion of the treatment can induce them to embark on a reproduction of them" -- "scenes" which, incidentally, the patients "have no feeling of remembering" and of which they "assure me emphatically of their unbelief". [Not quite what you get from Masson's account of Freud's female patients telling him they'd been sexually abused in early childhood -- the phony story Freud told in his later accounts of the episode.] I hope this gives you some idea of how little students will get from most psychology texts about the actual origins of Freud's theories, as against the fairy story versions originating from Freud and passed down the generations. Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London http://www.esterson.org ---
