father of psychoanalysis, was an influential thinker of the twentieth
century. Working initially in close collaboration with Joseph Breuer,
Freud elaborated the theory that the mind is a complex energy-system,
the structural investigation of which is proper province of
psychology. He articulated and refined the concepts of the
unconscious, of infantile sexuality, of repression, and proposed a
tripartite account of the mind's structure, all as part of a radically
new conceptual and therapeutic frame of reference for the
understanding of human psychological development and the treatment of
abnormal mental conditions. Notwithstanding the multiple
manifestations of psychoanalysis as it exists today, it can in almost
all fundamental respects be traced directly back to Freud's original
work. Further, Freud's innovative treatment of human actions, dreams,
and indeed of cultural artifacts as invariably possessing implicit
symbolic significance has proven to be extraordinarily fecund, and has
had massive implications for a wide variety of fields, including
anthropology, semiotics, and artistic creativity and appreciation in
addition to psychology. However, Freud's most important and frequently
re-iterated claim, that with psychoanalysis he had invented a new
science of the mind, remains the subject of much critical debate and
controversy.
1. Life
Freud was born in Frieberg, Moravia in 1856, but when he was four
years old his family moved to Vienna, where Freud was to live and work
until the last year of his life. In 1937 the Nazis annexed Austria,
and Freud, who was Jewish, was allowed to leave for England. For these
reasons, it was above all with the city of Vienna that Freud's name
was destined to be deeply associated for posterity, founding as he did
what was to become known as the 'first Viennese school' of
psychoanalysis, from which, it is fair to say, psychoanalysis as a
movement and all subsequent developments in this field flowed. The
scope of Freud's interests, and of his professional training, was very
broad – he always considered himself first and foremost a scientist,
endeavoring to extend the compass of human knowledge, and to this end
(rather than to the practice of medicine) he enrolled at the medical
school at the University of Vienna in 1873. He concentrated initially
on biology, doing research in physiology for six years under the great
German scientist Ernst Brücke, who was director of the Physiology
Laboratory at the University, thereafter specialising in neurology. He
received his medical degree in 1881, and having become engaged to be
married in 1882, he rather reluctantly took up more secure and
financially rewarding work as a doctor at Vienna General Hospital.
Shortly after his marriage in 1886 – which was extremely happy, and
gave Freud six children, the youngest of whom, Anna, was herself to
become a distinguished psychoanalyst – Freud set up a private practice
in the treatment of psychological disorders, which gave him much of
the clinical material on which he based his theories and his
pioneering techniques.
In 1885-86 Freud spent the greater part of a year in Paris, where he
was deeply impressed by the work of the French neurologist Jean
Charcot, who was at that time using hypnotism to treat hysteria and
other abnormal mental conditions. When he returned to Vienna, Freud
experimented with hypnosis, but found that its beneficial effects did
not last. At this point he decided to adopt instead a method suggested
by the work of an older Viennese colleague and friend, Josef Breuer,
who had discovered that when he encouraged a hysterical patient to
talk uninhibitedly about the earliest occurrences of the symptoms, the
latter sometimes gradually abated. Working with Breuer, Freud
formulated and developed the idea that many neuroses (phobias,
hysterical paralyses and pains, some forms of paranoia, etc.) had
their origins in deeply traumatic experiences which had occurred in
the past life of the patient but which were now forgotten, hidden from
consciousness; the treatment was to enable the patient to recall the
experience to consciousness, to confront it in a deep way both
intellectually and emotionally, and in thus discharging it, to remove
the underlying psychological causes of the neurotic symptoms. This
technique, and the theory from which it is derived, was given its
classical expression in Studies in Hysteria, jointly published by
Freud and Breuer in 1895.
Shortly thereafter, however, Breuer, found that he could not agree
with what he regarded as the excessive emphasis which Freud placed
upon the sexual origins and content of neuroses, and the two parted
company, with Freud continuing to work alone to develop and refine the
theory and practice of psychoanalysis. In 1900, after a protracted
period of self-analysis, he published The Interpretation of Dreams,
which is generally regarded as his greatest work, and this was
followed in 1901 by The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and in 1905
by Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Freud's psychoanalytic
theory was initially not well received – when its existence was
acknowledged at all it was usually by people who were, as Breuer had
foreseen, scandalized by the emphasis placed on sexuality by Freud –
and it was not until 1908, when the first International
Psychoanalytical Congress was held at Salzburg, that Freud's
importance began to be generally recognized. This was greatly
facilitated in 1909, when he was invited to give a course of lectures
in the United States, which were to form the basis of his 1916 book
Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. From this point on Freud's
reputation and fame grew enormously, and he continued to write
prolifically until his death, producing in all more than twenty
volumes of theoretical works and clinical studies. He was also not
adverse to critically revising his views, or to making fundamental
alterations to his most basic principles when he considered that the
scientific evidence demanded it – this was most clearly evidenced by
his advancement of a completely new tripartite (id, ego, and
super-ego) model of the mind in his 1923 work The Ego and the Id. He
was initially greatly heartened by attracting followers of the
intellectual calibre of Adler and Jung, and was correspondingly
disappointed personally when they both went on to found rival schools
of psychoanalysis – thus giving rise to the first two of many schisms
in the movement – but he knew that such disagreement over basic
principles had been part of the early development of every new
science. After a life of remarkable vigour and creative productivity,
he died of cancer while exiled in England in 1939.
2. Backdrop to his Thought
Although a highly original thinker, Freud was also deeply influenced
by a number diverse factors which overlapped and interconnected with
each other to shape the development of his thought. As indicated
above, both Charcot and Breuer had a direct and immediate impact upon
him, but some of the other factors, though no less important than
these, were of a rather different nature. First of all, Freud himself
was very much a Freudian – his father had two sons by a previous
marriage, Emmanuel and Philip, and the young Freud often played with
Philip's son John, who was his own age. Freud's own self-analysis –
which forms the core of his masterpiece The Interpretation of Dreams -
originated in the emotional crisis which he suffered on the death of
his father, and the series of dreams to which this gave rise. This
analysis revealed to him that the love and admiration which he had
felt for his father were mixed with very contrasting feelings of shame
and hate (such a mixed attitude he termed 'ambivalence'). Particularly
revealing was his discovery that he had often fantasised as a youth
that his half-brother Philip (who was of an age with his mother) was
really his father, and certain other signs convinced him of the deep
underlying meaning of this fantasy – that he had wished his real
father dead, because he was his rival for his mother's affections.
This was to become the personal (though by no means exclusive) basis
for his theory of the Oedipus complex.
Secondly, and at a more general level, account must be taken of the
contemporary scientific climate in which Freud lived and worked. In
most respects, the towering scientific figure of nineteenth century
science was Charles Darwin, who had published his revolutionary Origin
of Species when Freud was four years old. The evolutionary doctrine
radically altered the prevailing conception of man – whereas before
man had been seen as a being different in nature to the members of the
animal kingdom by virtue of his possession of an immortal soul, he was
now seen as being part of the natural order, different from non-human
animals only in degree of structural complexity. This made it possible
and plausible, for the first time, to treat man as an object of
scientific investigation, and to conceive of the vast and varied range
of human behavior, and the motivational causes from which it springs,
as being amenable in principle to scientific explanation. Much of the
creative work done in a whole variety of diverse scientific fields
over the next century was to be inspired by, and derive sustenance
from, this new world-view, which Freud, with his enormous esteem for
science, accepted implicitly.
An even more important influence on Freud, however, came from the
field of physics. The second 50 years of the nineteenth century saw
monumental advances in contemporary physics, which were largely
initiated by the formulation of the principle of the conservation of
energy by Helmholz. This principle states, in effect, that the total
amount of energy in any given physical system is always constant, that
energy quanta can be changed but not annihilated, and consequently
that when energy is moved from one part of the system it must reappear
in another part. The progressive application of this principle led to
the monumental discoveries in the fields of thermodynamics,
electromagneticism, and nuclear physics which, with their associated
technologies, have so comprehensively transformed the contemporary
world. As we have seen, when he first came to the University of Vienna
Freud worked under the direction of Ernst Brücke, who in 1874
published a book setting out the view that all living organisms,
including the human one, are essentially energy-systems to which, no
less than to inanimate objects, the principle of the conservation of
energy applies. Freud, who had great admiration and respect for
Brücke, quickly adopted this new 'dynamic physiology' with enthusiasm.
From there it was but a short conceptual step – but one which Freud
was the first to take, and on which his claim to fame is largely
grounded – to the view that there is such a thing as 'psychic energy',
that the human personality is also an energy-system, and that it is
the function of psychology to investigate the modifications,
transmissions, and conversions of 'psychic energy' within the
personality which shape and determine it. This latter conception is
the very cornerstone of Freud's psychoanalytic theory.
3. The Theory of the Unconscious
Freud's theory of the unconscious, then, is highly deterministic, a
fact which, given the nature of nineteenth century science, should not
be surprising. Freud was arguably the first thinker to apply
deterministic principles systematically to the sphere of the mental,
and to hold that the broad spectrum of human behavior is explicable
only in terms of the (usually hidden) mental processes or states which
determine it. Thus, instead of treating the behavior of the neurotic
as being causally inexplicable—which had been the prevailing approach
for centuries—Freud insisted, on the contrary, on treating it as
behaviour for which is meaningful to seek an explanation by searching
for causes in terms of the mental states of the individual concerned.
Hence the significance which he attributed to slips of the tongue or
pen, obsessive behaviour, and dreams – all, he held, are determined by
hidden causes in the person's mind, and so they reveal in covert form
what would otherwise not be known at all. This suggests the view that
freedom of the will is, if not completely an illusion, certainly more
tightly circumscribed than is commonly believed, for it follows from
this that whenever we make a choice we are governed by hidden mental
processes of which we are unaware and over which we have no control.
The postulate that there are such things as unconscious mental states
at all is a direct function of Freud's determinism, his reasoning here
being simply that the principle of causality requires that such mental
states should exist, for it is evident that there is frequently
nothing in the conscious mind which can be said to cause neurotic or
other behavior. An 'unconscious' mental process or event, for Freud,
is not one which merely happens to be out of consciousness at a given
time, but is rather one which cannot, except through protracted
psychoanalysis, be brought to the forefront of consciousness. The
postulation of such unconscious mental states entails, of course, that
the mind is not, and cannot be, identified with consciousness or that
which can be an object of consciousness – to employ a much-used
analogy, it is rather structurally akin to an iceberg, the bulk of it
lying below the surface, exerting a dynamic and determining influence
upon the part which is amenable to direct inspection, the conscious
mind.
Deeply associated with this view of the mind is Freud's account of the
instincts or drives. The instincts, for Freud, are the principal
motivating forces in the mental realm, and as such they 'energise' the
mind in all of its functions. There are, he held, an indefinitely
large number of such instincts, but these can be reduced to a small
number of basic ones, which he grouped into two broad generic
categories, Eros (the life instinct), which covers all the
self-preserving and erotic instincts, and Thanatos (the death
instinct), which covers all the instincts towards aggression,
self-destruction, and cruelty. Thus it is a mistake to interpret Freud
as asserting that all human actions spring from motivations which are
sexual in their origin, since those which derive from Thanatos are not
sexually motivated – indeed, Thanatos is the irrational urge to
destroy the source of all sexual energy in the annihilation of the
self. Having said that, it is undeniably true that Freud gave sexual
drives an importance and centrality in human life, human actions, and
human behavior which was new (and to many, shocking), arguing as he
does both that the sexual drives exist and can be discerned in
children from birth (the theory of infantile sexuality), and that
sexual energy (libido) is the single most important motivating force
in adult life. However, even here a crucial qualification has to be
added—Freud effectively redefined the term 'sexuality' here to make it
cover any form of pleasure which is or can be derived from the body.
Thus his theory of the instincts or drives is essentially that the
human being is energized or driven from birth by the desire to acquire
and enhance bodily pleasure.
4. Infantile Sexuality
Freud's theory of infantile sexuality must be seen as an integral part
of a broader developmental theory of human personality. This had its
origins in, and was a generalisation of, Breuer's earlier discovery
that traumatic childhood events could have devastating negative
effects upon the adult individual, and took the form of the general
thesis that early childhood sexual experiences were the crucial
factors in the determination of the adult personality. From his
account of the instincts or drives it followed that from the moment of
birth the infant is driven in his actions by the desire for
bodily/sexual pleasure, where this is seen by Freud in almost
mechanical terms as the desire to release mental energy. Initially,
infants gain such release, and derive such pleasure, through the act
of sucking, and Freud accordingly terms this the 'oral' stage of
development. This is followed by a stage in which the locus of
pleasure or energy release is the anus, particularly in the act of
defecation, and this is accordingly termed the 'anal' stage. Then the
young child develops an interest in its sexual organs as a site of
pleasure (the 'phallic' stage), and develops a deep sexual attraction
for the parent of the opposite sex, and a hatred of the parent of the
same sex (the 'Oedipus complex'). This, however, gives rise to
(socially derived) feelings of guilt in the child, who recognizes that
it can never supplant the stronger parent. In the case of a male, it
also puts the child at risk, which he perceives – if he persists in
pursuing the sexual attraction for his mother, he may be harmed by the
father; specifically, he comes to fear that he may be castrated. This
is termed 'castration anxiety'. Both the attraction for the mother and
the hatred are usually repressed, and the child usually resolves the
conflict of the Oedipus complex by coming to identify with the parent
of the same sex. This happens at the age of five, whereupon the child
enters a 'latency' period, in which sexual motivations become much
less pronounced. This lasts until puberty, when mature genital
development begins, and the pleasure drive refocuses around the
genital area.
This, Freud believed, is the sequence or progression implicit in
normal human development, and it is to be observed that at the infant
level the instinctual attempts to satisfy the pleasure drive are
frequently checked by parental control and social coercion. The
developmental process, then, is for the child essentially a movement
through a series of conflicts, the successful resolution of which is
crucial to adult mental health. Many mental illnesses, particularly
hysteria, Freud held, can be traced back to unresolved conflicts
experienced at this stage, or to events which otherwise disrupt the
normal pattern of infantile development. For example, homosexuality is
seen by some Freudians as resulting from a failure to resolve the
conflicts of the Oedipus complex, particularly a failure to identify
with the parent of the same sex; the obsessive concern with washing
and personal hygiene which characterises the behaviour of some
neurotics is seen as resulting from unresolved conflicts/repressions
occurring at the anal stage.
5. Neuroses and The Structure of the Mind
Freud's account of the unconscious, and the psychoanalytic therapy
associated with it, is best illustrated by his famous tripartite model
of the structure of the mind or personality (although, as we have
seen, he did not formulate this until 1923), which has many points of
similarity with the account of the mind offered by Plato over 2,000
years earlier. The theory is termed 'tripartite' simply because, again
like Plato, Freud distinguished three structural elements within the
mind, which he called id, ego, and super-ego. The id is that part of
the mind in which are situated the instinctual sexual drives which
require satisfaction; the super-ego is that part which contains the
'conscience', namely, socially-acquired control mechanisms (usually
imparted in the first instance by the parents) which have been
internalized; while the ego is the conscious self created by the
dynamic tensions and interactions between the id and the super-ego,
which has the task of reconciling their conflicting demands with the
requirements of external reality. It is in this sense that the mind is
to be understood as a dynamic energy-system. All objects of
consciousness reside in the ego, the contents of the id belong
permanently to the unconscious mind, while the super-ego is an
unconscious screening-mechanism which seeks to limit the blind
pleasure-seeking drives of the id by the imposition of restrictive
rules. There is some debate as to how literally Freud intended this
model to be taken (he appears to have taken it extremely literally
himself), but it is important to note that what is being offered here
is indeed a theoretical model, rather than a description of an
observable object, which functions as a frame of reference to explain
the link between early childhood experience and the mature adult
(normal or dysfunctional) personality.
Freud also followed Plato in his account of the nature of mental
health or psychological well-being, which he saw as the establishment
of a harmonious relationship between the three elements which
constitute the mind. If the external world offers no scope for the
satisfaction of the id's pleasure drives, or, more commonly, if the
satisfaction of some or all of these drives would indeed transgress
the moral sanctions laid down by the super-ego, then an inner conflict
occurs in the mind between its constituent parts or elements – failure
to resolve this can lead to later neurosis. A key concept introduced
here by Freud is that the mind possesses a number of 'defense
mechanisms' to attempt to prevent conflicts from becoming too acute,
such as repression (pushing conflicts back into the unconscious),
sublimation (channeling the sexual drives into the achievement
socially acceptable goals, in art, science, poetry, etc.), fixation
(the failure to progress beyond one of the developmental stages), and
regression (a return to the behavior characteristic of one of the
stages).
Of these, repression is the most important, and Freud's account of
this is as follows: when a person experiences an instinctual impulse
to behave in a manner which the super-ego deems to be reprehensible
(e.g. a strong erotic impulse on the part of the child towards the
parent of the opposite sex), then it is possible for the mind push it
away, to repress it into the unconscious. Repression is thus one of
the central defense mechanisms by which the ego seeks to avoid
internal conflict and pain, and to reconcile reality with the demands
of both id and super-ego. As such it is completely normal and an
integral part of the developmental process through which every child
must pass on the way to adulthood. However, the repressed instinctual
drive, as an energy-form, is not and cannot be destroyed when it is
repressed – it continues to exist intact in the unconscious, from
where it exerts a determining force upon the conscious mind, and can
give rise to the dysfunctional behavior characteristic of neuroses.
This is one reason why dreams and slips of the tongue possess such a
strong symbolic significance for Freud, and why their analysis became
such a key part of his treatment – they represent instances in which
the vigilance of the super-ego is relaxed, and when the repressed
drives are accordingly able to present themselves to the conscious
mind in a transmuted form. The difference between 'normal' repression
and the kind of repression which results in neurotic illness is one of
degree, not of kind – the compulsive behavior of the neurotic is
itself a behavioral manifestation of an instinctual drive repressed in
childhood. Such behavioural symptoms are highly irrational (and may
even be perceived as such by the neurotic), but are completely beyond
the control of the subject, because they are driven by the now
unconscious repressed impulse. Freud positioned the key repressions,
for both the normal individual and the neurotic, in the first five
years of childhood, and, of course, held them to be essentially sexual
in nature – as we have seen, repressions which disrupt the process of
infantile sexual development in particular, he held, lead to a strong
tendency to later neurosis in adult life. The task of psychoanalysis
as a therapy is to find the repressions which are causing the neurotic
symptoms by delving into the unconscious mind of the subject, and by
bringing them to the forefront of consciousness, to allow the ego to
confront them directly and thus to discharge them.
6. Psychoanalysis as a Therapy
Freud's account of the sexual genesis and nature of neuroses led him
naturally to develop a clinical treatment for treating such disorders.
This has become so influential today that when people speak of
'psychoanalysis' they frequently refer exclusively to the clinical
treatment; however, the term properly designates both the clinical
treatment and the theory which underlies it. The aim of the method may
be stated simply in general terms – to re-establish a harmonious
relationship between the three elements which constitute the mind by
excavating and resolving unconscious repressed conflicts. The actual
method of treatment pioneered by Freud grew out of Breuer's earlier
discovery, mentioned above, that when a hysterical patient was
encouraged to talk freely about the earliest occurrences of her
symptoms and fantasies, the symptoms began to abate, and were
eliminated entirely she was induced to remember the initial trauma
which occasioned them. Turning away from his early attempts to explore
the unconscious through hypnosis, Freud further developed this
'talking cure', acting on the assumption that the repressed conflicts
were buried in the deepest recesses of the unconscious mind.
Accordingly, he got his patients to relax in a position in which they
were deprived of strong sensory stimulation, even of keen awareness of
the presence of the analyst (hence the famous use of the couch, with
the analyst virtually silent and out of sight), and then encouraged
them to speak freely and uninhibitedly, preferably without
forethought, in the belief that he could thereby discern the
unconscious forces lying behind what was said. This is the method of
free-association, the rationale for which is similar to that involved
in the analysis of dreams—in both cases the super-ego is to some
degree disarmed, its efficiency as a screening mechanism is moderated,
and material is allowed to filter through to the conscious ego which
would otherwise be completely repressed. The process is necessarily a
difficult and protracted one, and it is therefore one of the primary
tasks of the analyst to help the patient to recognize, and to
overcome, his own natural resistances, which may exhibit themselves as
hostility towards the analyst. However, Freud always took the
occurrence of resistance as a sign that he was on the right track in
his assessment of the underlying unconscious causes of the patient's
condition. The patient's dreams are of particular interest, for
reasons which we have already partly seen. Taking it that the
super-ego functioned less effectively in sleep, as in free
association, Freud made a distinction between the manifest content of
a dream (what the dream appeared to be about on the surface) and its
latent content (the unconscious, repressed desires or wishes which are
its real object). The correct interpretation of the patient's dreams,
slips of tongue, free-associations, and responses to carefully
selected questions leads the analyst to a point where he can locate
the unconscious repressions producing the neurotic symptoms,
invariably in terms of the patient's passage through the sexual
developmental process, the manner in which the conflicts implicit in
this process were handled, and the libidinal content of his family
relationships. To effect a cure, he must facilitate the patient
himself to become conscious of unresolved conflicts buried in the deep
recesses of the unconscious mind, and to confront and engage with them
directly.
In this sense, then, the object of psychoanalytic treatment may be
said to be a form of self-understanding – once this is acquired, it is
largely up to the patient, in consultation with the analyst, to
determine how he shall handle this newly-acquired understanding of the
unconscious forces which motivate him. One possibility, mentioned
above, is the channeling of the sexual energy into the achievement of
social, artistic or scientific goals – this is sublimation, which
Freud saw as the motivating force behind most great cultural
achievements. Another would be the conscious, rational control of the
formerly repressed drives – this is suppression. Yet another would be
the decision that it is the super-ego, and the social constraints
which inform it, which are at fault, in which case the patient may
decide in the end to satisfy the instinctual drives. But in all cases
the cure is effected essentially by a kind of catharsis or purgation –
a release of the pent-up psychic energy, the constriction of which was
the basic cause of the neurotic illness.
Critical Evaluation of Freud
It should be evident from the foregoing why psychoanalysis in general,
and Freud in particular, have exerted such a strong influence upon the
popular imagination in the Western World over the past 90 years or so,
and why both the theory and practice of psychoanalysis should remain
the object of a great deal of controversy. In fact, the controversy
which exists in relation to Freud is more heated and multi-faceted
than that relating to virtually any other recent thinker (a possible
exception being Darwin), with criticisms ranging from the contention
that Freud's theory was generated by logical confusions arising out of
his alleged long-standing addiction to cocaine (Cf. Thornton, E.M.
Freud and Cocaine: The Freudian Fallacy) to the view that he made an
important, but grim, empirical discovery, which he knowingly
suppressed in favour of the theory of the unconscious, knowing that
the latter would be more acceptable socially (Cf. Masson, J. The
Assault on Truth).
It should be emphasised here that Freud's genius is not (generally) in
doubt, but the precise nature of his achievement is still the source
of much debate. The supporters and followers of Freud (and Jung and
Adler) are noted for the zeal and enthusiasm with which they espouse
the doctrines of the master, to the point where many of the detractors
of the movement see it as a kind of secular religion, requiring as it
does an initiation process in which the aspiring psychoanalyst must
himself first be analysed. In this way, it is often alleged, the
unquestioning acceptance of a set of ideological principles becomes a
necessary precondition for acceptance into the movement – as with most
religious groupings. In reply, the exponents and supporters of
psychoanalysis frequently analyze the motivations of their critics in
terms of the very theory which those critics reject. And so the debate
goes on.
Here we will confine ourselves to: (a) the evaluation of Freud's claim
that his theory is a scientific one, (b) the question of the theory's
coherence, (c) the dispute concerning what, if anything, Freud really
discovered, and (d) the question of the efficacy of psychoanalysis as
a treatment for neurotic illnesses.
a. The Claim to Scientific Status
This is a crucially important issue, since Freud not alone saw himself
first and foremost as a pioneering scientist, but repeatedly asserted
that the significance of psychoanalysis is that it is a new science,
incorporating a new scientific method of dealing with the mind and
with mental illness. And there can be no doubt but that this has been
the chief attraction of the theory for most of its advocates since
then – on the face of it, it has the appearance of being, not just a
scientific theory, but an enormously strong scientific theory, with
the capacity to accommodate, and explain, every possible form of human
behaviour. However, it is precisely this latter which, for many
commentators, undermines its claim to scientific status. On the
question of what makes a theory a genuinely scientific one, Karl
Popper's criterion of demarcation, as it is called, has now gained
very general acceptance: namely, that every genuine scientific theory
must be testable, and therefore falsifiable, at least in principle –
in other words, if a theory is incompatible with possible observations
it is scientific; conversely, a theory which is compatible with all
possible observations is unscientific (Cf. Popper, K. The Logic of
Scientific Discovery). Thus the principle of the conservation of
energy, which influenced Freud so greatly, is a scientific one,
because it is falsifiable – the discovery of a physical system in
which the total amount of energy was not constant would conclusively
show it to be false. And it is argued that nothing of the kind is
possible with respect to Freud's theory – if, in relation to it, the
question is asked: 'What does this theory imply which, if false, would
show the whole theory to be false?', the answer is 'nothing', the
theory is compatible with every possible state of affairs – it cannot
be falsified by anything, since it purports to explain everything.
Hence it is concluded that the theory is not scientific, and while
this does not, as some critics claim, rob it of all value, it
certainly diminishes its intellectual status, as that was and is
projected by its strongest advocates, including Freud himself.
b. The Coherence of the Theory
A related (but perhaps more serious) point is that the coherence of
the theory is, at the very least, questionable. What is attractive
about the theory, even to the layman, is that it seems to offer us
long sought-after, and much needed, causal explanations for conditions
which have been a source of a great deal of human misery. The thesis
that neuroses are caused by unconscious conflicts buried deep in the
unconscious mind in the form of repressed libidinal energy would
appear to offer us, at last, an insight in the causal mechanism
underlying these abnormal psychological conditions as they are
expressed in human behavior, and further show us how they are related
to the psychology of the 'normal' person. However, even this is
questionable, and is a matter of much dispute. In general, when it is
said that an event X causes another event Y to happen, both X and Y
are, and must be, independently identifiable. It is true that this is
not always a simple process, as in science causes are sometimes
unobservable (sub-atomic particles, radio and electromagnetic waves,
molecular structures, etc.), but in these latter cases there are clear
'correspondence rules' connecting the unobservable causes with
observable phenomena. The difficulty with Freud's theory is that it
offers us entities (repressed unconscious conflicts, for example)
which are said to be the unobservable causes of certain forms of
behavior, but there are no correspondence rules for these alleged
causes – they cannot be identified except by reference to the
behaviour which they are said to cause (i.e. the analyst does not
demonstratively assert: 'This is the unconscious cause, and that is
its behavioural effect'; he asserts: 'This is the behaviour, therefore
its unconscious cause must exist'). And this does raise serious doubts
as to whether Freud's theory offers us genuine causal explanations at
all.
c. Freud's Discovery?
At a less theoretical, but no less critical level, it has been alleged
that Freud did make a genuine discovery, which he was initially
prepared to reveal to the world, but the response which he encountered
was so ferociously hostile that he masked his findings, and offered
his theory of the unconscious in its place (Cf. Masson, J. The Assault
on Truth). What he discovered, it has been suggested, was the extreme
prevalence of child sexual abuse, particularly of young girls (the
vast majority of hysterics are women), even in respectable nineteenth
century Vienna. He did in fact offer an early 'seduction theory' of
neuroses, which met with fierce animosity, and which he quickly
withdrew, and replaced with theory of the unconscious. As one
contemporary Freudian commentator explains it, Freud's change of mind
on this issue came about as follows:
Questions concerning the traumas suffered by his patients seemed
to reveal [to Freud] that Viennese girls were extraordinarily often
seduced in very early childhood by older male relatives; doubt about
the actual occurrence of these seductions was soon replaced by
certainty that it was descriptions about childhood fantasy that were
being offered. (MacIntyre).
In this way, it is suggested, the theory of the Oedipus complex was generated.
This statement begs a number of questions, not least, what does the
expression 'extraordinarily often' mean in this context? By what
standard is this being judged? The answer can only be: by the standard
of what we generally believe – or would like to believe – to be the
case. But the contention of some of Freud's critics here is that his
patients were not recalling childhood fantasies, but traumatic events
in their childhood which were all too real, and that he had stumbled
upon, and knowingly suppressed, the fact that the level of child
sexual abuse in society is much higher than is generally believed or
acknowledged. If this contention is true – and it must at least be
contemplated seriously – then this is undoubtedly the most serious
criticism that Freud and his followers have to face.
Further, this particular point has taken on an added, and even more
controversial significance in recent years with the willingness of
some contemporary Freudians to combine the theory of repression with
an acceptance of the wide-spread social prevalence of child sexual
abuse. The result has been that, in the United States and Britain in
particular, many thousands of people have emerged from analysis with
'recovered memories' of alleged childhood sexual abuse by their
parents, memories which, it is suggested, were hitherto repressed. On
this basis, parents have been accused and repudiated, and whole
families divided or destroyed. Unsurprisingly, this in turn has given
rise to a systematic backlash, in which organizations of accused
parents, seeing themselves as the true victims of what they term
'False Memory Syndrome', have denounced all such memory-claims as
falsidical, the direct product of a belief in what they see as the
myth of repression. (Cf. Pendergast, M. Victims of Memory). In this
way, the concept of repression, which Freud himself termed 'the
foundation stone upon which the structure of psychoanalysis rests',
has come in for more widespread critical scrutiny than ever before.
Here, the fact that, unlike some of his contemporary followers, Freud
did not himself ever countenance the extension of the concept of
repression to cover actual child sexual abuse, and the fact that we
are not necessarily forced to choose between the views that all
'recovered memories' are either veridical or falsidical, are, perhaps
understandably, frequently lost sight of in the extreme heat generated
by this debate.
d. The Efficacy of Psychoanalytic Therapy
It does not follow that, if Freud's theory is unscientific, or even
false, it cannot provide us with a basis for the beneficial treatment
of neurotic illness, because the relationship between a theory's truth
or falsity and its utility-value is far from being an isomorphic one.
(The theory upon which the use of leeches to bleed patients in
eighteenth century medicine was based was quite spurious, but patients
did sometimes actually benefit from the treatment!). And of course
even a true theory might be badly applied, leading to negative
consequences. One of the problems here is that it is difficult to
specify what counts as a cure for a neurotic illness, as distinct,
say, from a mere alleviation of the symptoms. In general, however, the
efficiency of a given method of treatment is usually clinically
measured by means of a 'control group' – the proportion of patients
suffering from a given disorder who are cured by treatment X is
measured by comparison with those cured by other treatments, or by no
treatment at all. Such clinical tests as have been conducted indicate
that the proportion of patients who have benefited from psychoanalytic
treatment does not diverge significantly from the proportion who
recover spontaneously or as a result of other forms of intervention in
the control groups used. So the question of the therapeutic
effectiveness of psychoanalysis remains an open and controversial one.
7. References and Further Reading
a. Works by Freud
* The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud (Ed. J. Strachey with Anna Freud), 24 vols . London:
1953-1964.
b. Works on Freud
* Bettlelheim, B. Freud and Man's Soul. Knopf, 1982.
* Cavell, M. The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to Philosophy.
Harvard University Press, 1993.
* Chessick, R.D. Freud Teaches Psychotherapy. Hackett Publishing
Company, 1980.
* Cioffi, F. (ed.) Freud: Modern Judgements. Macmillan, 1973.
* Dilman, I. Freud and the Mind. Blackwell, 1984.
* Edelson, M. Hypothesis and Evidence in Psychoanalysis.
University of Chicago Press, 1984.
* Fancher, R. Psychoanalytic Psychology: The Development of
Freud's Thought. Norton, 1973.
* Farrell, B.A. The Standing of Psychoanalysis. Oxford University
Press, 1981.
* Freeman, L. The Story of Anna O. – The Woman who led Freud to
Psychoanalysis. Paragon House, 1990.
* Frosh, S. The Politics of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to
Freudian and Post-Freudian Theory. Yale University Press, 1987.
* Grünbaum, A. The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical
Critique. University of California Press, 1984.
* Hook, S. (ed.) Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method, and
Philosophy. New York University Press, 1959.
* Jones, E. Sigmund Freud: Life and Work (3 vols), Basic Books, 1953-1957.
* Klein, G.S. Psychoanalytic Theory: An Exploration of Essentials.
International Universities Press, 1976.
* MacIntyre, A.C. The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis.
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958.
* Freud. Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 3 (ed. P. Edwards).
Collier Macmillan, 1967.
* Mackay, N. Motivation and Explanation: An Essay on Freud's
Philosophy of Science. International Universities Press, 1989.
* Masson, J. The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the
Seduction Theory. Faber & Faber, 1984.
* Popper, K. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Hutchinson, 1959.
* Pendergast, M. Victims of Memory. HarperCollins, 1997.
* Reiser, M. Mind, Brain, Body: Towards a Convergence of
Psychoanalysis and Neurobiology. Basic Books, 1984.
* Ricoeur, P. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation
(trans. D. Savage). Yale University Press, 1970.
* Schafer, R. A New Language for Psychoanalysis. Yale University
Press, 1976.
* Sherwood, M. The Logic of Explanation in Psychoanalysis.
Academic Press, 1969.
* Stewart, W. Psychoanalysis: The First Ten Years, 1888-1898.
Macmillan, 1969.
* Sulloway, F. Freud, Biologist of the Mind. Basic Books, 1979.
* Thornton, E.M. Freud and Cocaine: The Freudian Fallacy. Blond &
Briggs, 1983.
* Wallace, E.R. Freud and Anthropology: A History and Reappraisal.
International Universities Press, 1983.
* Whyte, L.L. The Unconscious Before Freud. Basic Books, 1960.
* Wollheim, R. Freud. Fontana, 1971.
* Wollheim, R. (ed.) Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays. Anchor, 1974.
* Wollheim, R. & Hopkins, J. (eds.) Philosophical Essays on Freud.
Cambridge University Press, 1982.
See also the articles on Descartes' Mind-Body Distinction,
Higher-Order Theories of Consciousness and Introspection.
No comments:
Post a Comment