On 12 January 2008, Chris wrote in relation to James Mark Baldwin's 1930 autobiographical piece: >I was struck, however, by the fact that his assessment of >psychoanalysis... consisted of a number of criticisms that are >often taken to be of more recent origin.
In fact through the decades one can find the same (or similar) criticisms of psychoanalysis, but these all fell by the wayside with the growth of the influence of the psychoanalytic movement devoted to furthering the cause. Here are some examples of other investigators' conclusions, many of which resonate with the words of Baldwin: Albert Moll, 1912: "The impression created in my mind is that the theory of Freud and his followers suffices to account for the clinical histories, not that the clinical histories suffice to prove the truth of the theory. Freud endeavors to establish his theory by the aid of psychoanalysis. But this involves so many arbitrary interpretations that it is impossible to speak of truth in any strict sense of the term." Pierre Janet, 1914: "Not only, as we have seen, is everything generalized beyond measure, but the terms all have a semi-mystical meaning, or, rather, have a double meaning, and we never know how they must be interpreted." Pierre Janet, 1925: "Owing to the nature of their [psychoanalysts'] methods, they can invariably find what they seek." A. Wohlgemuth, 1923: "I have searched and researched psychoanalytic literature for [facts]. However, whenever I looked more closely at any pretended 'fact' it turned out to be a phantom. Dogmatic assertions, unproved statements, arbitrary interpretations with ignorance, or ignoring, of scientific method and contempt for logical reasoning, was all I found the 'facts' invariably to be." Aldous Huxley, 1925: "It was the machinery of symbolism, by which the analyst transforms the manifest into the latent dream content, that shook any faith I might possibly have had in the system... There are no better reasons for believing that walking upstairs or flying are the dream equivalents of fornication than for believing that the girl in the Song of Solomon is the Church of Christ." William McDougall, 1926: "The world of concepts in which Freud conducts his tours of discovery is so fluid and shifting that it lends itself to every manipulation. Every emotion, and every sentiment, is ambivalent, is both itself and its opposite, and can be transmuted into something radically different; every sign and symbol can be interpreted in opposite ways." William McDougall, 1936: "In short, is it not obvious that, if we allowed ourselves the laxity of reasoning which is habitual to Freud and many of his disciples, and if we possessed his fertile ingenuity, there would be literally no limits to the possibilities of application of his principles?" How did Freud and his disciples respond to these kinds of detailed criticisms? The short answer is that they largely ignored them with the familiar cry "resistance!". Freud portrayed his critics in 1933 as follows: "...it is a fact that there was no violation of logic, and no violation of propriety and good taste, to which the scientific opponents of psychoanalysis did not give way at that time [the early period of psychoanalysis]... I soon saw that there was no future in polemics... so I took another road. I made a first application of psychoanalysis by explaining to myself that this behaviour of the crowd was a manifestation of the same resistance which I had to struggle against in individual patients...[...] There is a common saying that we should learn from our enemies. I confess I have never succeeded in doing so; but I thought all the same that it might be instructive for you if I undertook a review of all the reproaches and objections which the opponents of psychoanalysis have raised against it, and if I went on to point out the injustices and offences against logic which could so easily be revealed in them. But on second thoughts I told myself that it would not be interesting but would become tedious and distressing and would be precisely what I have been so carefully avoiding all these years" [New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis, SE 22, pp. 137-139] Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London http://www.esterson.org --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
