In response to my quoting the following from Aldous Huxley among a number
of assessments of Freud's work in line with Baldwin's from the early part
of the twentieth century
>> "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."
Chris Green wrote on 12 January 2008:
>True, but not exactly the most impeccable scientific source.
Of course I was aware that Huxley was in a different category from the
other writers I quoted, but I'm unclear why Chris's response is relevant
here. First, Huxley's criticism is based on his reading of Freud's writings
on his dream theories, and is *entirely apposite* in relation to a major
element in Freud's theory of dreams, which Freud himself regarded as a
cornerstone of his psychoanalytic work: "It [The Interpretation of Dreams]
contains... the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good
fortune to make. Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a
lifetime." (1931, Preface to the Third [revised] English edition.) Second,
one does not need to be a scientist to assess "The Interpretation of
Dreams", any more than Freud's other writings. I might add here that Freud
explicitly appealed over the heads of those he called his "scientific
opponents" to the general public. As McDougall observed: "Freud panders to
every vice of popular speech and thinking; and, by doing so, effectively
appeals to the lay public (in matters psychological the medical men are
part of the lay public)... " (1936)
In response to my quoting two of McDougall's perspicacious comments on
Freud's methodology Chris wrote:
>McDougall and his elaborate theory of instincts was not much
>better regarded by the scientific community (which is among the
>reasons he was forced out of Harvard to Duke).
As Hergenhahn writes in his *Introduction to the History of Psychology*,
McDougall was promoting "a psychology that emphasized instinct in the
increasingly anti-instinct [i.e., anti-hereditarian - A.E.] climate of US
psychology". (McDougall defined an instinct as "an inherited or innate
psycho-physical disposition...") I'm again unclear why this is relevant to
the validity or otherwise of McDougall's comments, based on a close reading
of Freud's writings and contained in two book-length analyses of the
latter: *Freud and Social Psychology* (1926) and *Psychoanalysis and Social
Psychology* (1936).
Chris wrote:
>And while we are listing the psychological world's reaction to Freud,
>it is only fair to note that his one trip to North America was sponsored
>by G. Stanley Hall (who also had a theory about the impact of sexuality
>on child development), and was attended by many important figures in
>the field, including William James (who expressed ambivalence). To
>be entirely honest, though, it was US psychiatry, much more than US
>psychology, that promoted Freud on this side of the pond.
I hope it was clear from my introductory words in my previous posting that
I wasn't purporting to be "listing the psychological world's reaction to
Freud", only providing examples of psychologists and the like who had
expressed similar views of Freud's work to that of Baldwin, of whom Chris
had written that he had made criticisms often taken to be of recent origin.
I certainly didn't intend (or expect) these to be taken as *typical* of
responses to Freud's work by psychologists and others in the first part of
the twentieth century.
> it is only fair to note that his one trip to North America was sponsored
>by G. Stanley Hall (who also had a theory about the impact of sexuality
>on child development), and was attended by many important figures in
>the field, including William James (who expressed ambivalence).
It is also relevant in relation to this that much of Freud's impact around
this time was the result of the extraordinarily compelling accounts he gave
of his work in his popular expositions, e.g., in the *Five Lectures on
Psychoanalysis* that he delivered at Clark University in 1909 under the
sponsorship of Hall. Had I attended these lectures I would also have been
impressed, being unaware (as his audience in 1909 would have been) that he
provided an utterly misleading account of his clinical experiences to a
degree that one can only appreciate if one has knowledge of, or close
familiarity with, (i) the original case notes of Breuer's treatment
(1880-1882) of Bertha Pappenheim ("Anna O."), not available until
discovered by Henri Ellenberger around 1970 (ii) letters Freud wrote to his
future wife Martha Bernays in 1882-1884 (iii) the letters he wrote to his
friend and confidant Wilhelm Fliess in the 1890s (which Freud tried to get
hold of and destroy) that were not published in unexpurgated form until
1985 (iv) his actual clinical methodology (as can be discerned from the
case histories in *Studies on Hysteria*, his 1896 seduction theory papers,
and the "Dora" case history), as against his grossly misleading reports of
his clinical procedures and 'findings' in the "Five Lectures".
Allen Esterson
Former lecturer, Science Department
Southwark College, London
http://www.esterson.org
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