(9) Sun 17 Aug 97 17:44 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Freud Debunked 1/4 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:308b 23118d80 @MSGID: 1:278/15 0018403a FREUD DEBUNKED -- WHAT DREAMS ARE REALLY MADE OF 08/05/90 The Sacramento Bee IN THE spring of 1900, shortly after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud wrote a letter to a friend, "Do you suppose," he asked, "that someday one will read on a marble tablet on this house: `Here, on July 24, 1895, the secret of the dream revealed itself to Dr. Sigm. Freud'?" Freud's faith in his theory never wavered. He told an American lecture audience that "the interpretation of dreams is in fact the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious. It is the securest foundation of psychoanalysis and the field in which every worker must acquire his convictions and seek his training." IN 1977 Freud's dream theory was finally commemorated with the plaque he had hoped for. In that same year, by coincidence, a campaign began that would enlist all the tools of modern neuroscience in an effort to dethrone Freud and to vanquish the cult of the dream. Chief among the debunkers is a Harvard psychiatrist and neuroscientist Allan Hobson. In a steady series of books and lectures and research papers and debates he has argued that the psychoanalytic theory of dreams is a museum piece, as outdated as theories of possession by demons. Hobson is 57, trim, and a bit above medium height, with wispy white hair and a long, thin nose, which was rearranged by muggers a couple of decades ago. He is an animated man, a good talker, whose voice rises and whose delivery speeds up as he works his way to a punch line. In his office at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, a facility affiliated with Harvard Medical School, he is recounting a dream from the previous night. Hobson was talking with a woman at what seemed to be a reunion of his medical school class. What was strange, what made the dream "dreamy," was that he couldn't quite place her. "Only eight women were in my class, and I know them all," he says. "Some of the data suggested classmate A, but the woman's actual appearance was closer to that of classmate B, though not precisely." What is the psychological significance of that confusion? Hobson's voice grows loud and indignant. "It's not my mother, or somebody else that's stuck in there dressed like my medical school classmates. My mind, or brain-mind, was making the best of a bad job. It was trying to fit the thing together into some whole meaning, and it didn't work." That picture of the dreamer as a kind of sorcerer's apprentice, racing madly to keep up with a flood of imagery, is central to Hobson's theory. Every night, he says, the dreaming brain automatically generates a barrage of signals that we do our best to assemble into a coherent story. The imagery itself has no "message," but the mind, waking or dreaming, cannot help investing its world with meaning. This view stands conventional thinking about dreaming on its head. Dreams are caused by electrochemical signals darting helter-skelter around the brain, like untied balloons released in a room. The familiar expression "I had a dream" should probably be reversed: "A dream had me." Hobson has restricted his attention to the formal properties of dreams, the features that all dreams share. He wants to know why dreams are bizarre, why they are vivid, and why they are hard to remember. The specifics of a given dream -- why I dreamed of my grandfather last night -- lie outside his reach. Hobson does not deny that dreams have meaning. They are revealing, he says, much as interpretations of Rorschach inkblots can be. The particular narrative that a dreamer fashions from randomly generated signals does reflect his preoccupations and hopes and fears. The dispute is over where the meaning of dreams lies. Hobson's dreamer reveals himself by what he adds to a jumble of apparently unrelated elements. Freud's view was just the opposite. The unconscious, he said, teems with secret, forbidden wishes that we cannot bear to acknowledge. To guard our sleep, a censor disguises and subtracts information from our dreams so that we can endure them. Dreams seem strange and full of gaps and scene shifts because the censor has gotten to the newsstand ahead of us, tearing out incriminating pages, blacking out key sentences, disguising photographs. Hobson concedes that we all walk around with painful memories that we do our best to banish. But he emphatically rejects Freud's view that those repressed memories are the cause of dreams. Instead, he says, dreams are caused by the brain's spontaneous self-activation while we sleep. On the specific nature of dreams Hobson has little use for Freud. Dreams are not obscure but transparent; they are not censored but unedited; dreaming is not triggered by daily events that resurrect buried memories but is a process as automatic as breathing. Most important, the characteristic strangeness of dreams is not a result of the dreamer's inability to face up to unpleasant memories. The explanation, according to Hobson, is simply that the dreaming brain is working under adverse conditions, deprived of any access to information from the outside world while laboring to fashion a tale from a cascade of internally generated signals. Where a physiological explanation is at hand, he says, a psychological explanation is unnecessary. "The nonsensical features of dreams are not a psychological defense," Hobson notes, "any more than the disoriented ramblings of a patient with Alzheimer's disease are." -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (10) Sun 17 Aug 97 17:44 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Freud Debunked 2/4 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:307b 23118d80 @MSGID: 1:278/15 0018403b THE SCIENCE underlying Hobson's theory of dreaming stems from a discovery by a most unlikely Archimedes, a ne'er-do-well graduate student named Eugene Aserinsky. In 1952 Aserinsky was studying physiology at the University of Chicago. For no very clear reason Aserinsky wanted to know how a person's eyes move while he is asleep. The best way to tackle the problem, he decided, was to observe a sleeper for a full night. The most convenient research subject available was his 8-old son, Armond. Aserinsky found an ancient electroencephalograph machine, abandoned in a university basement. He taped electrodes near Armond's eyes and used the electroencephalograph, a machine akin to a lie detector, to record any eye movement. The pens attached to the EEG would occasionally interrupt their slow, wavy tracing of Armond's eye movements and begin marking spiky peaks and valleys. The interruptions seemed to show that the brain was occasionally as active in sleeping as in waking. That didn't make sense, and Aserinsky figured he still hadn't fixed his machine. Scientists thought of the sleeping brain as like a house late at night, the day's hubbub of activity replaced by the quiet hum of rest. We wake refreshed, conventional wisdom had it, because the brain has had a break from work. Aserinsky's research adviser was one of the leading proponents of this view. Episodes of rapid eye movement, Aserinsky was soon convinced, came periodically throughout the night. "Well, it was a pretty quick jump to think of dreaming," Aserinsky says. "But that wasn't an idea I readily accepted. As a physiologist, I was more interested in blood and guts than in behavior." Aserinsky now recruited a number of volunteers; he woke them up when their eyes began twitching and they reported that they had indeed been dreaming. IN THE following years discoveries about rapid-eye-movement sleep tumbled out of laboratories around the world. Wake someone up during REM sleep and about 80 percent of the time he or she will report vivid, elaborate, hallucinatory dreams; wake the person during one of the bursts of particularly intense eye movement that punctuate REM sleep and the odds rise to 95 percent. But if the sleeper isn't wakened, the dream will almost certainly be lost. Dreams melt quickly: 95 percent of what we dream, perhaps 99 percent, is never remembered. REM sleep begins some 90 minutes after we fall asleep. The brain begins running at full speed, blood pressure rises, breathing quickens, and the heart beats faster. Muscles become totally relaxed and unresponsive, though eyes and extremities may twitch. The dreamer is floating free in a self- created universe, his churning brain trying to keep its bearings without any cues from the outside world. Episodes of REM-sleep are separated by calmer, deeper periods of sleep. We may dream during these hiatuses, but such dreams are rarer than REM-sleep ones and tend to be briefer and less bizarre. And every 90 minutes we automatically shift back into REM sleep. We pass through four or five such dream episodes a night. They grow longer as the night goes on, and total about two hours. REM sleep has been found in all mammals studied to date except the spiny anteater, and, to a limited extent, in birds and some reptiles. (Any cat or dog owner watching his pet's twitching eyes and paws could have anticipated Aserinsky's discovery.) A newborn baby spends about eight hours a day in REM sleep. And before birth, at about 30 weeks after conception, the developing infant appears to spend almost all its time in REM sleep. Just what infants (let alone animals) could be dreaming about is unclear. David Foulkes, a psychologist at Emory University in Atlanta, has done the best work on the dreams of children. By monitoring children in a sleep lab and waking them at intervals, he found that children aged 3 to 7 rarely reported that they'd been dreaming. After the age of 7 children seem to dream about as often as adults. The nature of dreams, as well as their frequency, changes with age. The earliest dreams are brief and almost devoid of action -- a child might dream of herself asleep in a bathtub. At age 5, 6 or 7 dreams become much longer but the dreamer still figures out rarely as an active participant in the dreams. By age 8 or 9 children's dreams begin to become as complex and lengthy as adult ones. Any of the REM-sleep discoveries could have called Freud's dream theory into question. If dreams are caused by wishes, as Freud proposed, why should those wishes come every 90 minutes? If dreams are caused by repressed sexual desires, what unmentionable fantasies is a newborn baby entertaining? What of Fido asleep in front of the fireplace? But the scientific assault on Freud waited another generation. The fortress, apparently, was strong, and didn't have to be abandoned just because of some sniper fire from the physiologists' camp. What was needed, in addition to criticism of Freud, was a scientifically based theory that could serve as an alternative to Freudian ideas. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (11) Sun 17 Aug 97 17:44 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Freud Debunked 3/4 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:f02a 23118d80 @MSGID: 1:278/15 0018403d THIS ATTACK on Freud began in 1977, when Hobson and his longtime collaborator, Robert McCarley, a psychiatrist who teaches at Harvard, published two papers on dreaming in the American Journal of Psychiatry. The articles, written in dry and rigorous prose, were explicitly intended as assaults on psychoanalysis. The two articles amounted to a one-two punch. First came a critique of Freud's "antique neurobiology." Freud's dream theory, Hobson and McCarley argued, was based on the brain science of the 1890s, which is now universally agreed to be obsolete. Since those biological ideas had proved false, a psychology built on them must also be mistaken. The first decade of Freud's career was devoted to neurobiology and neurology. "The intention," Freud announced, "is to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science." That goal was never achieved. After a few months of frenzied work in 1895, Freud left the "Project" unfinished. Abandoning neuroscience, he turned his efforts to psychology. His theory of dreams, Freud later said, was based on a lengthy, painful self-analysis in the mid-1890s rather than on any theory of how the brain works. By probing his own emotions and earliest memories with ruthless honesty, psychoanalytic history has it, Freud unearthed such prizes as the Oedipus complex, the stages of sexual development and the source of "accidental" slips of the tongue. His most important tool was free association, mainly with respect to the material from dreams. Hobson and McCarley didn't buy it. The self-analysis story, they insisted, was a myth. Freud's dream theory was simply a translation of the "Project" into a form that concealed its origins in neurobiology. The second paper described Hobson and McCarley's own theory. In the years since it was written, Hobson has continued to refine his model. (McCarley, still a friend and ally, has gone his own way.) The fullest account appears in Hobson's 1988 book, The Dreaming Brain. Dreaming is so familiar that we tend to overlook it strangeness. In Hobson's summary: "We see things, but the lights are out; we imagine running, flying, or dancing the tango, but are paralyzed; we explain the bizarre proceedings to our full satisfaction, but the logic by which we do so is as bizarre as the proceedings; we have intense emotional involvement in the action, but we forget the whole business as soon as it is over. What is going on?" THAT QUESTION, like What is time?, is easy to ask but maddeningly hard to answer. The brain, estimated to contain between 20 billion and 100 billion nerve cells, is one of the most complicated regions in the universe. The brain's nerve cells communicate in chemical messages called neurotransmitters, and each nerve cell, or neuron, is in simultaneous communication with upward of 10,000 others. Each cell sends between two and a hundred messages every second, ceaselessly, day and night. By a process that no one claims to understand, this electrified mound of gray-white Jell-O-like matter somehow becomes conscious. Brain becomes mind. But a daunting chasm separates the two. Physiologists assess one side of the territory, psychologists and therapists the other. Most of what sleep physiologists know about the living brain they've learned from cats. That may sound like a peculiar choice for research intended to explain the mystery of thought, but it is a practical one. Cat and human brains are roughly similar in design, and for a student of sleep a better subject would be hard to find. A generation or so ago new tools were developed that provide more detailed pictures of the brain at work than EEGs could offer. These are microelectrodes that record not electrical activity in general but the activity of single cells in particular. The tiny probes revealed that many neurons in the visual areas of the brain fire at least as often in REM sleep as they do in waking. That was a surprise. When a wide-awake cat eyes the world, its visual cortex lights up with activity. Let that cat fall asleep, eyes shut tight in a black room and the same cells will light up just as intensely. The brain interprets its own internally generated signals as if they had come from outside. Similarly, brain cells that have to do with physical activity fire as intensely in REM sleep as in waking. None of this was known in Freud's day. For Freud, for example, the question of why dreams are so intensely visual was a tricky one. Dreams represent a regression to infancy, he argued, and therefore a return to a mental life dominated by imagery rather than thought. For Hobson, matters are simpler. Dreams are visual because the dreaming brain is bombarded by internally generated signals that make it think it is seeing. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (12) Sun 17 Aug 97 17:44 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Freud Debunked 4/4 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:319b 23118d80 @MSGID: 1:278/15 0018403f Lately Hobson has been stirring up a new group. These are therapists who hold no brief for Freud but are devoted students of dreams. They dislike Hobson's theory because they feel that it denigrates dreaming. Anyone interested in the meaning of dreams may choose among 50 or more psychology and self-help books. Dozens of college and universities around the country, including such unlikely schools as Notre Dame and the Stanford School of Business, offer courses on working with dreams. Hobson rails against what he calls "the dream-cult people." Doffing his scientist's lab coat in favor of his psychiatrist's tweed jacket, he mounts his attack. "I've never had an experience in therapy of feeling that a dream was a turning point of treatment," he says, "or a revelation of a truth not otherwise suspected or known, or anything else of that nature. And I have had successful therapies where dreams were almost never discussed." That is heresy to the dream groups, who have pruned and trimmed the Freudian garden but who continue to huddle under the familiar old tree at its center. Freud's approach to dream interpretation was off target, they say, but his basic insight was valid: Dreams are a royal road to the unconscious, messages to ourselves that convey truths we might otherwise miss. Faced with such challenges from psychotherapists, Hobson retreats just long enough to slip back into his lab coat. "I'd have no quarrel if they'd tell patients, `This isn't based on science; it's more like interpreting literary texts.' I say to them, `Stand up and be counted. Don't say you're a doctor if you're an artist.' " BRAIN CELLS are now known to be of two types, excitatory and inhibitory. Excitatory cells transmit electrochemical impulses that increase the activity of the cells they contact; inhibitory cells decrease that activity. In Freud's day only excitatory cells were known. "This meant," one scientist explains, "that once you got a notion in your head, it was doomed to run around in there forever until you finally decided to do something about it. Or, alternatively, until it found a way to trick you into unconsciously expressing it in some unintended action -- like the famous `Freudian slip.' " Similarly, it was thought that repressed wishes would boil and bubble endlessly in the cauldron of the unconscious, until they managed to emerge, suitable disguised, as dreams. "It never dawns on psychoanalyst," says Frank Sulloway, a historian of science and a revisionist Freud scholar, "that if Freud was wrong about the general properties of dreams, he might also have been wrong about the interpretation of specific dreams." THE SCIENCE of dreaming has brought a humbling message: The dream was undisguised all along. Like Poe's purloined letter, it lay hidden in plain sight. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (13) Sun 17 Aug 97 17:44 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Freud the fraud 1/4 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:9954 23118d80 @MSGID: 1:278/15 00184031 Freud the fraud 05/29/94 The Times of London (His case studies of patients `remembering' their unhappy childhoods guaranteed his place as the father of modern psychoanalysis. But Sigmund Freud's scientific methods were a fraud) ### Last November, the New York Review Of Books ran a piece by Frederick Crews, professor of English at Berkeley, which, in the words of a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, "aroused the fear and rage of many psychoanalysts". The storm of protest and outrage was of such proportions that Time magazine ran a cover story on the affair, and the shock waves reaching this side of the Atlantic resulted in several newspaper articles. These tended to be hostile to Crews's conclusions, while exhibiting little knowledge of the published work he cited which is bringing about a radical reassessment of Freud. Over the past two decades, meticulous scholarship has revealed that much of what we thought we knew about Freud bears only a tenuous relationship to the ascertainable facts. Many of the legends surrounding his life and work have been shown to be self-propagated falsehoods. Not the least of these has been what the philosopher Frank Cioffi, a long-standing critic of psychoanalytic theory, called "the myth of Freud's superlative integrity". Indeed, so reluctant have commentators and scholars been, until recently, to acknowledge Freud's untruthfulness that Cioffi once defined a lie as "an interested falsehood propagated by someone not Freud". As evidence that Freud's word cannot always be trusted has seeped through to the wider world, few people would now be prepared to affirm his integrity in the absolute terms that were once commonplace. Nevertheless, the extent to which recent scholarship has undermined his supposed achievements has yet to be appreciated, even by many of his severest critics. Among the charges against Freud are: The clinical claims made at the time of his so-called "seduction theory", an episode which led directly to the birth of psychoanalysis, were open to serious doubts. His retrospective accounts of these early clinical experiences are full of anomalies, inconsistencies and falsehoods. The means by which he justified his subsequent "findings of psychoanalysis" are similar to, and as unreliable as, those used at the time of the seduction theory episode. Much of the dissembling in his retrospective accounts of the latter was in order to conceal this. His psychoanalytic sexual theories were not, as he claimed, derived directly from his treatment of neurotic patients in his Vienna practice. (His patients were predominantly female, yet his psychoanalytic theories were originally conceived in terms of males.) He imposed preconceived notions on his patients, then proclaimed them as clinical discoveries. His interpretive technique was so elastic that it was effectively a means of validating self-fulfilling prophecies, misleadingly presented as "discoveries" or "findings of analytic research". He made claims of specific cures which are now known to be false. For instance, there is the case of the "hysteric" Bertha Pappenheim ("Anna O"), whose cathartic-style treatment by his colleague, Josef Breuer, Freud described as having "brought psychoanalysis into existence". On several occasions, he claimed that the patient had been completely cured. In fact, she remained in a serious condition, with many of her original symptoms, for some considerable time after the treatment ended. A similar story attaches to Serge Pankejeff, the subject of the celebrated "Wolf Man" case history, which occupies a central place in psychoanalytic literature. Freud claimed the treatment to have had a successful outcome. This has been denied by the patient, who eventually considered it a failure. From the beginning he was making general claims for the therapeutic success of his new technique, which were contradicted by what he was saying privately. His subsequent assertions regarding the efficacy of psychoanalytic therapy were made without substantiation, and are highly suspect. (In a letter to Jung in 1906, he stated explicitly that he was, for tactical reasons, suppressing the truth about the limitations of his therapeutic method.) His case histories, most notably those of the "Wolf Man" and the "Rat Man", are unreliable. It is frequently difficult to distinguish analytic inferences from straightforward data, and there are strong indications of factual distortions and even fabrications of evidence. His general expositions of psychoanalysis, which have played a considerable part in disseminating Freud's ideas, abound with misleading claims and specious arguments, the weaknesses of the latter frequently being concealed by persuasive rhetoric. In short, if Freud's lifework is considered without the misconceptions accumulated during the course of this century, it is revealed to be an edifice whose foundations are so flimsy that only the delusion that it is supported by a considerable body of evidence enables it to remain a serious contender in the field of psychological enquiry. If the above indictment is true, how is it Freud's numerous champions in academia could have been deceived to quite such a degree? Perhaps the best way to show how such wide-ranging deception could have occurred is to recount the extraordinary story of the celebrated seduction theory episode. Open almost any book on Freud and you will find an account of how, in the 1890s, most of his female patients said that they had been sexually molested in early childhood by their fathers. However, he soon discovered that in most cases sexual abuse had not actually occurred; from this insight he realised the importance of unconscious phantasy in our lives. This story, as told by Freud himself in An Autobiographical Study (1925) and New Introductory Lectures On Psychoanalysis (1933), has long been regarded as historical fact yet it is false. The true facts, as far as they are ascertainable, are as follows. In February and April 1896, Freud published three papers in which he put forward the theory that hysteria and obsessional neurosis were a consequence of sexual molestation in infancy, and claimed he had corroborated it clinically. The introductory paragraphs of the third one (The Aetiology Of Hysteria) affirm that Freud obtained his corroborations by means of his new technique of psychoanalytic inference and interpretation, rather than from his patients' direct reports. In the same paper he refers to his patients "reproducing" scenes of sexual molestation in infancy. He also records that the patients "have no feelings of remembering the (sexual) scenes", and assure him "emphatically of their unbelief". -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (14) Sun 17 Aug 97 17:44 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Freud the fraud 2/4 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:99a4 23118d80 @MSGID: 1:278/15 00184033 These comments are explained by Freud's accounts of the procedure he was using at that time to uncover supposed unconscious traumatic memories. In his contribution to Studies On Hysteria, published in collaboration with Josef Breuer in 1895, he described how, while inducing patients to recall significant experiences, he frequently had to "tell the patient what his next connection of thought is going to be", and sometimes had to "laboriously force some piece of knowledge" on them. Confirmation of his surmises came from the "tension and signs of emotion with which (the patient) tries to disavow the emerging memory". His confidence in his ability to divine what lay unconscious in the minds of his patients was such that he was undismayed when they told him, "But I can't remember having thought it". Such protestations only served to demonstrate the strength of unconscious resistance to the emergence of the disturbing memories. In October 1895, he conjectured that hysteria and obsessional neurosis were a consequence of sexual traumas in infancy. (He had reported not a single such case prior to this time.) Within a few months, he publicly announced that he had confirmed the occurrence of infantile molestations for all his current patients. However, in 1897, he began to have doubts about his theory. This left him in something of a quandary. Not only was he faced with the humiliating task of having to admit that his self-proclaimed discovery of "a caput Nili (source of the Nile) in neuropathology" was erroneous, it also seemed that his analytic technique had led to spurious confirmations. He postponed dealing with the first difficulty for nine years, and then disingenuously contrived to present his "mistake" in an almost favourable light. The second problem he resolved by pronouncing that the unconscious "memories" were genuine only they were mostly "phantasies" (unconscious ideas) created by the patients themselves. Not that it was quite that simple. In his original papers he had raised possible objections to his seduction theory and (apparently) decisively rebutted them. Unblushingly, he put forward three of the same objections as reasons why he had abandoned the theory! He had also stated that in the case of the obsessional patients he had found that they had experienced both a passive sexual trauma, and, in later infancy, an active (pleasurable) experience. However, this distinction between the experiences of hysterics and obsessionals had no role in his developing phantasy theory, and so these "findings" were never mentioned again. He had also been rather specific about the supposed culprits, grouping them into three distinct categories: adult strangers, adult acquaintances (eg governesses or teachers adult close relatives were mentioned in the third paper, but not the first two), and slightly older siblings. That was all right when he had merely to confirm the seduction theory, for which any assailant would do. But this did not fit in with his new theory, and no more was heard of the original cast of characters. So who did take over the role (now, in most cases, phantasised) of sexual assailants? In 1906, he wrote only that many of his patients had phantasised sexual seductions as a way of "fending off (unconscious) memories" of infantile masturbation, an account essentially the same as the one he published in 1914. (This was in tune with the great significance he had accorded infantile masturbation in his 1905 paper, Three Essays On The Theory Of Sexuality.) However, in 1925 a new element entered the retrospective accounts. Freud was starting to develop his ideas on female sexuality, and his theory of the Oedipus complex posited that infant girls were sexually attracted to their fathers. The "seducers" were now identified they were fathers, phantasised about by their lustful young daughters. This final version of the story was consolidated in New Introductory Lectures: "In the period when the main interest was directed to discovering infantile sexual traumas, almost all my women patients told me that they had been seduced by their father ... It was only later that I was able to recognise in this phantasy of being seduced by the father the expression of the typical Oedipus complex in women." It was from this hotchpotch of anomalies, inconsistencies and falsehoods (not all recorded here) that there came the received account of the origins of psychoanalysis. Cioffi challenged the latter in the early 1970s, but was for many years a lone voice. Some half-dozen scholars have now published accounts at variance with the traditional version. One anomaly which should have alerted the scholar was that Freud wrote that it was only during the seduction theory period that most of his female patients reported paternal seductions in infancy. But if the stories were phantasised projections of Oedipal yearnings, why were they not recounted by his later female patients in the same numbers as before? The original papers point to other anomalies. Freud claims to have accomplished the remarkable feat of confirming the occurrence of infantile sexual molestations in every single one of his current cases (18 "hysterics", plus a few obsessionals) in spite of the fact that the uncovering of each supposed unconscious memory was achieved in the face of "enormous resistance" from the patient. One also immediately notices that some of the sexual assaults were stated to be of an horrific nature, a claim not to be found in any of his retrospective accounts. The detailed list of categories of culprits contrasts with the final version in which the father was the prime transgressor. People who have been influenced by the notion, widely disseminated by Jeffrey Masson's book The Assault On Truth (1984), that Freud's early patients regularly reported childhood sexual abuse by the father, tend to assert that Freud suppressed that fact because it was politic to have done so at that time. This claim is incompatible with the facts. The widely held belief that in the 1890s many of Freud's patients came to him with lurid stories of childhood sexual abuse is a myth. The actual course of events can be construed from the letters he wrote to his friend, Wilhelm Fliess, and, more specifically, from the seduction theory papers themselves. Freud compared the technique used to uncover the "sexual scenes" with situations in medical practice in which a physician is able to arrive at his diagnosis "without any (direct) information from the patient" (and even in the face of "the protestations of his patient"). This is a clear indication that the "scenes" were inferred by Freud himself, rather than reported by the patients. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (15) Sun 17 Aug 97 17:44 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Freud the fraud 3/4 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:59f5 23118d80 @MSGID: 1:278/15 00184035 The retrospective claim that fathers were the main culprits has been justified by asserting that Freud stated as much in the letter he sent to Fliess in September 1897. However, what Freud wrote there was that among the reasons why he could no longer believe in the seduction theory was "the surprise that in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse". Far from supporting the notion that fathers had been the culprits all along, it does the reverse. First, he would scarcely be expressing surprise at that time in relation to clinical experiences from 18 months and more ago he would have got over any surprise by then. Second, he did not say that fathers had been accused, but that they had to be accused in all cases if he was to be able to maintain his belief in the seduction theory. In letters to Fliess in 1897, he twice referred to his speculations that fathers must be involved, and mentioned a dream he interpreted as fulfilling his wish to catch a father as the cause of neuroses. In other words, the notion that fathers had been the prime abusers was as speculative as the original theory that his "hysterical" and obsessional patients had all been sexually molested in early childhood. Masson's thesis is no more credible than Freud's. It is not being asserted here that none of Freud's female patients was sexually abused by her father in early childhood. Conceivably a few of them were but we are not in a position to know this. Those who quote Freud's words as evidence should be wary we do not know whether they describe "reproductions" by the patient under the influence of his technique (involving suggestion and insistence), or authentic experiences. Aclose scrutiny of Freud's dissembling in relation to this episode indicates that his retrospective accounts describing the genesis of psychoanalysis are self-serving fables, which hide the unsound foundations on which his methodology and "findings" rest. Why have not the many academics and commentators who have read these accounts recognised that his story was suspect? In part, it is because Freud is one of the great storytellers, and a master of calculated ambiguity and persuasive rhetoric. Added to that, in his writings, with both subtle insidiousness and frank self-promotion, he presents a compelling image of himself as a man of superlative integrity. Each account of the seduction theory episode, seen in isolation without the knowledge that it is inconsistent with other accounts given elsewhere, reads like the open and honest reporting of events as they actually occurred. Someone who has not been made fully aware of the damning nature of the complete documentary evidence would find it almost impossible to believe he is the victim of deception. Faced with all the evidence indicating the doubtful nature of the clinical claims associated with the genesis of psychoanalysis, the Freudian is liable to argue that the validity of a scientific discovery does not depend on the legitimacy of the origination of the theory. This argument fails, because Freud's subsequent writings are frequently as steeped in unsubtantiated and misleading assertions as those relating to the seduction theory episode. To illustrate this, let us turn to psychoanalytic "findings" from much later in his career. In 1924-25, Freud turned his mind to the development of his theories of female sexuality, and in 1925 announced his discovery that the first libidinal attachment of infant girls is to their mother and not to the father, as he had previously maintained. In the second of his essays on the subject he reported for the first time the "very common" occurrence of fantasies of maternal seductions among his female patients. Within a short time, the story had become that his female patients "regularly accuse" their mothers of seducing them. The parallels with the seduction theory episode are obvious. Can it be true that the "discoveries" of one of the reputedly great names of 20th-century thought are essentially artefacts of his flawed investigative procedure? One must first appreciate that the alleged findings are rather different in character from conventional scientific material. Almost all of them pertain to unconscious processes, which can only be detected by the psychoanalytic method of divination. As Freud pronounced on several occasions: "The teachings of psychoanalysis are based on an incalculable number of observations and only someone who has repeated those observations on himself and on others is in a position to arrive at a judgment of his own upon it." What this edict asserts is that only those who endorse the analytic technique of inference and interpretation are entitled to hold any opinion concerning the authenticity of its claims. But if that technique is seriously defective, any "findings" obtained by its use are suspect. Since there are good grounds for doubting the validity of his analytic procedure, Freud's pronouncement is more consonant with a religious faith than a rationally held scientific belief. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (16) Sun 17 Aug 97 17:44 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Freud the fraud 4/4 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:9844 23118d80 @MSGID: 1:278/15 00184038 Given the invisibility of psychoanalytic clinical "observations" and Freud's genius for making even the most unlikely claims seem plausible, one begins to get an inkling of how he was able to convince so many people that he had made important psychological discoveries, albeit that these had been derived from the most tenuous of inferential grounds, and were largely products of his own imagination rather than of the minds of his patients. Analysts and Freud sympathisers claim that many of his discoveries have been corroborated in clinical work. The problem with this is that the corroborations depend on subjective analytic inferences and interpretations. Notoriously, Jungians and Freudians each find confirmation of their own notions in the dreams of their patients. Kleinians uncover a rich fantasy life in early infancy, which eludes the probings of analysts from other schools. Analysts of a feminist persuasion do not find indications of penis- envy in the psyches of their female patients, while orthodox Freudians almost invariably do. Feminist apologists have explained away Freud's ideas on women by saying he was circumscribed by the prevailing views of a patriarchal society, but this will not do. His "discoveries" in relation to women were justified by the same methodology which led to his other supposed discoveries. Freud, of course, produced an immense body of theoretical material. Where does this stand in the light of the above discussion? Although it cannot be divorced from the limitations of Freud's methods, this material also has to be considered in its own right. The task has been comprehensively undertaken by Malcolm Macmillan, of the Department of Psychology at Monash University in Australia. His critique, Freud Evaluated, was published in 1991. Anyone who, under the influence of Freud's reputation, believes he made well-founded contributions to our knowledge, will be disabused by this work of meticulous scholarship. As Macmillan observes, "Psychoanalysis as a theory of personality has little to recommend it ... (It) is not so much a bad theory, but a theory in search of some facts". Given that Freud's methodology is seriously flawed; that his clinical claims are open to question; that his theoretical conclusions are supported by defective, and sometimes incoherent, arguments; and that his writings abound with intellectually dishonest persuasive devices, and what Thomas Szasz, the psychiatrist, describes as "base rhetoric", how has he maintained his reputation as one of the great figures of Western thought? One factor is that a number of important insights, such as the recognition of the role of unconscious motivations in human behaviour, have become associated with Freud's name, even though they predate psychoanalysis. With respect to his own ideas, he had an extraordinary gift for making unlikely notions seem plausible. His writings pertaining to his clinical work have an air of authenticity. Also anybody familiar with his work will know why so many people have succumbed to what Ludwig Wittgenstein referred to as the "charm" of his writings. Rather fewer have heeded Wittgenstein's warning that under the spell of that charm "you may easily be fooled". Freud's defenders argue that to focus on such considerations is to miss the central point of his achievement. In a recent book, Paul Robinson writes that he is the leading source of our modern inclination to look for meanings beneath the surface of behaviour. The philosopher Thomas Nagel commends Freud for having extended the range of psychological explanations to unheard-of lengths. Such arguments seem less than compelling to those of us not enamoured of psychoanalytic modes of inference. Human beings have a powerful need to make sense of the world. We seek meaning in events and, more specifically, in other people's behaviour. Unfortunately, this frequently leads to credulity in the face of plausible notions that purport to supply explanations. The objection to Freud is that he provided the latter all too abundantly. In the words of the great psychologist William McDougall, his mode of explanation "panders to every vice of popular speech and thinking". Seen in these terms, Freud's achievement was to vulgarise insights already explicit in the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. (In a similar vein, the philospher Karl Jaspers wrote that Freud "trivialised the sublime insights of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche".) What implications does all this have for those forms of psychotherapy which are dependent on Freud's formulations? It is arguable that they have strayed so far from his original practice that they now have an independent life which must be examined largely on its own merits, a task that cannot be undertaken here. However, insofar as psychotherapists fail to recognise that much of Freud's methodology and theories are seriously flawed, they are likely to overrate the merits of their treatment. What of the future? Freud's reputation has been on the wane for some years, and is likely to decline further. No doubt psychotherapists will continue to use many of Freud's highly adaptable notions in their search for "insights" into their patients' behaviour and motivations. Freudian concepts will probably also retain their influence in certain areas of academia, where the psychoanalytic mode of discourse, with its almost unlimited interpretive potential, is unlikely to be relinquished. However, future historians may come to regard the rise of psychoanalysis to a position of prominence in the 20th century as one of the most extraordinary aberrations in the history of Western thought.Allen Esterson is the author of Seductive Mirage: An Exploration Of The Work Of Sigmund Freud, published by Open Court (distributed by Eurospan) -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (17) Sun 17 Aug 97 17:44 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Freud's Been Debunked 1/3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:24b8 23118d80 @MSGID: 1:278/15 00184040 Burying Freud.(Freudian psychology has been debunked) 03/09/96 The Lancet A century has passed since Freud started publishing the works that established his reputation as a scientist, healer, and sage, as one of the major thinkers of the 20th century, and as, in the words of the Freudian literary critic Harold Bloom (cited by Webster, ref 1, p3), "the central imagination of our age". Although his standing as a clinical scientist and biologist of the mind has always been precarious among those capable of judging scientific competence, his admirers have by no means been confined to the laiety. In 1938, the secretaries of the Royal Society brought him their official charter to sign, "thereby joining his signature with Newton's and Darwin's" (ref 1, p 430). Despite much early hostile criticism--sometimes motivated by overt or covert antisemitism--Freud's reputation simply grew. He was, and remains, more famous than his critics, who have often seemed mere detractors. And yet his reputation is deeply mysterious. Esterson2 has reflected that "the rise of psychoanalysis to a position of prominence in the twentieth century will come to be regarded as one of the most extraordinary aberrations in the history of Western thought". Medawar3 expressed similar sentiments: "Opinion is gaining ground that doctrinaire psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century: and a terminal product as well--something akin to a dinosaur or a zeppelin in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity." The tide now seems to be turning against Freud as the long overdue detailed and systematic appraisal of his contribution to our understanding of the psychobiology and organisation of the human mind, of the place of reason and passion in human affairs, and of the aetiology and treatment of mental illnesses has finally been undertaken. The verdict has been uniformly negative: Freud as a scientist, metapsychologist, and diagnostician of society emerges as a quack. This view has not greatly perturbed true believers. Freud's theories, notoriously, have an inbuilt survival kit: disagreement with them is regarded as a symptom of the very resistance they themselves predict, and therefore counts as confirmatory evidence. Psychoanalysis thus enjoys an extraordinary ability to shake off decisive criticism. The American historian Paul Robinson (cited by Webster1), writing as recently as 1993, asserted that Freud's critics "would do him no lasting damage": "At most they have delayed the inevitable process by which he will settle into his rightful place in intellectual history as a thinker of the first magnitude. Indeed the very latest scholarly studies of Freud suggest that the anti-Freudian moment may already have begun to pass." Evidently, anyone who would dispose of Freud once and for all faces a rather special challenge. A recent book has risen to that challenge: Richard Webster's Why Freud was wrong1 is not only a mighty work of synthesis, bringing together the immense recent research that has unpicked the interwoven legends of Freudian so-called science and Freud the man, but also places psychoanalysis in a wider context that enables us to understand the aetiology (I use the word advisedly) of the thought and of its influence. The result is a definitive critique from which it seems unlikely that Freud's reputation and that of the pseudoscience he invented will ever recover. Freud wanted, above all, to be recognised as a scientist, and famously resented friendly critics such as Havelock Ellis who suggested that psychoanalysis was more of an art than science. Grunbaum4 has examined Freud's procedures and shown how they bear no resemblance to the methods that have proved elsewhere so effective in arriving at reliable, generalisable, and practically useful conclusions. Consider the discovery of the repressed Oedipus complex. For Freud, this was the key to every neurosis; and it is the cornerstone of psychoanalytic thought. It was postulated on the basis of data acquired during his period of self-analysis. The crucial datum (note use of the singular) was Freud's recollection of a long train journey with his mother, when he was 2 years old, during which, according to the differing accounts he gives, he either must have seen her naked or actually did so, as a result of which he conceived a sexual desire for her. A few weeks after retrieving this quasi-memory, he concluded that the male sexual love of the mother was a universal event of early childhood. This huge jump was subsequently supported, Freud claimed, by direct observations in children, especially in analysis. Details, however, are strikingly lacking. Out of a single evaporating drop of pseudo-fact, he had created a roomful of steam. Those few of Freud's case histories that are possible to assess are invalidated, as evidence, by a confirmatory bias. Esterson2 shows how, again and again, Freud muddled his own conjectures of what was going on in his patient's unconscious with their accounts of what they later remembered and, over time, he came to represent the former as the latter. It was hardly surprising, then, that, like a first-year medical student or a hypochondriac making diagnoses, Freud found that everything he recalled from his consultations could fit his theories. This circularity, whereby the theory created the facts that supported the theory, should have been evident to anyone reading the published works, but few had noticed it. Only his disciples were sufficiently committed to read Freud's primary clinical papers, and the books in which Freud presented his work to a wider public dishonestly suggested much independent corroborative evidence. "The applications of analysis", he had blithely informed his disciples, "are always confirmations of it as well" (quoted in ref 2, p 246). In psychoanalysis Freud says: "the physician always gives his patient . . . the conscious anticipatory ideas by the help of which he is put in a position to recognise and to grasp the unconscious material" (Standard Edition 10: 104, quoted in ref 2) But it is in the nature of psychoanalysis that analytical experience is strongly influenced by the subjective notions of the physician who supplies the anticipatory ideas. Woe betide the analysano if he (or more often, she) does not cooperate. Freud described his brutally inquisitorial methods with extraordinary candour: "The work [of therapy] keeps coming to a stop and they keep maintaining that this time nothing has occurred to them. We must not believe what they say, we must always assume, and tell them too, that they have kept something back . . . We must insist on this, we must repeat the pressure and represent ourselves as infallible, till at last we are really told something . . . There are cases, too, in which the patient tries to disown [the memory] even after its return. 'Something has occurred to me now, but you obviously put it into my head' . . . In all such cases, I remain unshakably firm. I . . . explain to the patient that [these distinctions] are only forms of his resistance and pretexts raise by it against reproducing this particular memory, which we must recognise in spite of all this".5 -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (18) Sun 17 Aug 97 17:44 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Freud's Been Debunked 2/3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:2448 23118d80 @MSGID: 1:278/15 00184043 Not surprisingly, this approach, more like rape of the mind than history taking, led to catastrophic diagnostic errors. When a little girl whose abdominal pains he had been treating as an "unmistakable" hysteria died of an abdominal lymphoma 2 months after he had seemingly cured her, he defended himself robustly, claiming to have dealt satisfactorily with the hysteria (which he said "had used the tumour as the provoking cause"). Such were the means by which Freud built up the minute corpus of empirical data on which he erected--like an inverted pyramid--his huge theoretical edifice. In her pioneering study Thornton6 showed how, by the time of his fundamental discoveries, Freud had moved far away from the science of his day and in which he had been trained. His speculations were crucially influenced by an old-fashioned quasi-scientific Naturphilosophie (particularly evident in his foundational Project for a scientific psychology7), by the lunatic numerological notions and mystical fantasies of Wilhelm Fleiss--whom Freud described variously as the Kepler of biology and as his Messiah, and from whom he derived the idea of infantile sexuality--and by his own cocaine addiction. There are many reasons why it has taken so long to recognise Freud as a "cargo cult scientist" (to use Feynman's8 term), who was closer to L Ron Hubbard than to Einstein. Freud's mastery of the rhetoric of science to sustain his scientific fairy tale has been brilliantly investigated by the literary critic Robert Wilcocks.9 The Fliessian roots of Freudian thought were long suppressed by the keepers of the flame policing the archives.10,11 Endless recycling of a handful of so-called classic cases created the impression of a huge clinical database. And then there has been the reputation of Freud the man. Freud, George Steiner observed, was "a master narrator and builder of myths" (quoted in ref 1, p 7). The most important of these myths was that of himself as a selfless searcher after truth, a man of granite-like integrity, utterly incapable of fraud or even self-deception. This myth has not withstood close inspection. Thornton's6 exposure of the early cocaine episode was a fatal blow. Freud, desperate for academic glory, claimed to have found the cure for morphine addiction: substitution by cocaine which, he asserted, was non-addictive. He allowed his paper to be published, even when he knew that his single case, a close friend, had become a hopeless cocaine addict. The pattern of basing claims for universally applicable cures on a tendentiously reported series of n=1 cases was established. Webster1 builds on Thornton's7 portrait of a ruthlessly ambitious man, a brutally insensitive and unscrupulous clinician, quite unrepentant about those of his terrible diagnostic blunders of which he was aware, and a supreme manipulator of friends and colleagues in his endless quest for self- promotion. This portrait, convincing, chilling, and unforgettable, firmly rooted in documentary evidence, is somewhat at odds with the shilling lives and hagiographies (notably that of the obsequious Ernest Jones12). The sheer crankiness of Freud's ideas was concealed by his marvellous prose, which gave the ideas a veneer of clarity and a feeling of inevitability. Most cranks write badly. Moreover, his lunacy came from an unexpected angle: just like real science, analytical theory was difficult, technical, tough minded, and counterintuitive. His work also seemed at first to offer liberation--from prudishness, hypocrisy, and oppressive institutionalised religion, to which he gave a secular interpretation that put it in its place as a distorted expression of human desires. And, although his vision of humanity was not merely diminishing but also impoverishing, it was richly elaborated and wonderfully expressed. Freud had an untrammelled imagination (fuelled in the crucial years by cocaine) and a wonderful ability to connect the remotest corners of his intellectual world--to relate, as Webster puts it, 1 "the sexual anatomy of prehistoric birds to the obstinacy of 2-year-old children and the organic evolution of crocodiles to the meanness of Viennese aristocrats". So the idea of the work and the image of the man converged in that of a tough-minded clinical scientist who saw things that were concealed from others and had the courage to speak the unspeakable truths about humanity. Then there was the attraction of the movement he founded. As Gellner13 has argued, Freud's theories were alluring because they seemed to arise out of scientific clinical medicine while simultaneously answering to the residual religious longings of a secular age: "Freud did not discover the unconscious but endowed it with a ritual and a church"--thus combining the white coat with the cassock. The church was "manned by a well-groomed clerisy who promised a new kind of salvation"13 and who were incorporated into closely regulated guild. The early psychoanalytical movement was very much a gnostic brotherhood. As Strachey (cited by Malcolm14) reported, new recruits required no qualification other than a training analysis with Freud or one of his approved disciples--a process that combined the ritual of confession with the laying on of hands. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (19) Sun 17 Aug 97 17:44 By: Sheppard Gordon To: All Re: Freud's Been Debunked 3/3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- @EID:e419 23118d80 @MSGID: 1:278/15 00184044 People are starting to count the cost of the talking cure that Freud invented and marketed. The criticism that psychoanalysis is expensive and inefficacious has given way to the graver charge that it is often dangerous and destructive. Psychoanalysts have frequently imitated their master in attributing to psychological causes serious illnesses that have organic origins, with often fatal consequences. Even where they are not medically incompetent, their peculiar ideas often confuse and further undermine desperately vulnerable individuals. Few psychoanalysts are as nakedly psychopathic as Lacan,15,16 Freud's most prominent French disciple, but many do not shrink from manipulating the affections and misplaced faith of their clients to ensure continuing lucrative commitment to their quack remedies. Freud's once unique ability to suggest to his patients the very facts that he required to support and fulfil his theory-fantasies, reinforced by his aura of wisdom, is now disseminated among hundreds of thousands of disciples who may not be psychoanalysts but who have derived from his theories a belief in the central importance of certain kinds of repressed memories and in the therapist's privileged access to them. The scale of the damage has recently become manifest in the USA, where, according to Crews,5 since 1988 1000000 families have been estimated to be affected by therapist-inspired charges of sexual molestation, supposedly uncovered by the awakening of repressed memories. There are especially bitter ironies here. During this century, as Webster1 points out, many women have suffered immensely as a result of orthodox psychoanalysts construing real episodes of sexual abuse as oedipal fantasies. Now the all-knowing therapist is able to persuade individuals that they have suffered sexual abuse of which they have no recollection. The irresponsible guesswork of the recovered memory therapists damages not only those who have not been sexually abused, but also threatens to discredit the testimony of those who have. Common to both the Freudian therapists' denial of real sexual abuse and recovered memory therapists' imputation of sexual abuse the victim does not recall is an arrogant over-riding of the testimony of ordinary people. The zealots are unlikely to be impressed by arguments that the theory of repression is both unnecessary and incoherent. When Freudians talk about the unconscious, they are often simply talking about things of which we are conscious but are not yet conscious of reflectively.17 In accordance with their own theories, they should not, of course, fuse these things: the unconscious is supposed to be composed of psychic elements that have been actively repressed rather than simply not yet brought into full consciousness. But this crucial notion of active repression is incoherent. As Sartre18 pointed out, the unconscious has to know what it is that has to be repressed in order (actively) to repress it; it has also to know that it is shameful material appropriate for repression. If, however, it knows both these things, it is difficult to understand how it can avoid being conscious of it. The only way round this difficulty would be to reduce repression to forgetfulness, and this would undermine the fundamental Freudian principle that repression is, unlike mere forgetfulness, active and targeted. The greatness of Webster's book lies not only in his review of the primary and secondary literature, nor only in his wonderfully lucid and witty prose, but in the penetration of his understanding of the man and his influence. Webster is also a brilliant story-teller. His account of the early days of the movement--the schisms pursued with the irrationality and vindictiveness of confessional wars, the loves that collapse into hatreds, the paranoia, the misuse of clinical judgment to discredit enemies, the use of personal insult and demonological abuse to deal with reasoned dissent--is utterly enthralling. And he never loses sight of the fundamental themes: Freud's messianic fantasies, his lifelong dream, as Freud himself states, of "opening all secrets with a single key", his deep insecurity, his raging hunger for recognition, and the theological and biogenetic underpinning of his thought. Webster's critique offers a context within which Freud can be placed and a viewpoint from which he can be seen. Webster shows how, despite his biological rhetoric, Freud belongs firmly within a gnostic and Manichean framework, and is imbued with a Judaeo-Christian asceticism that would puritanically dispose of the body. Freud does "not so much sexualise the realm of the intellect as intellectualise the realm of the sexual"--by reducing it to abstract categories, and so separating clean mind from dirty body, lifting Man out of Nature by favouring abstraction over incarnation. Webster takes issue with this "doomed and tragic attempt to reconstitute at the intellectual level a sensual identity which has been crucified at the level of the vital and spontaneous body" and offers the beginnings of an alternative, Darwinian, framework for understanding humanity. This latter is a marvellous challenge to people, including myself, for whom neo-Darwinian thought spectacularly fails to account for the distinctive features of humankind.19 Even when psychoanalysis has been shown to be utterly misconceived--as the basis of a treatment, as a theory of human nature, as a means of thinking about society and the world--it is difficult to shake off a sneaking suspicion that it must have some kind of special validity, if only because it has always been there, with its all-purpose explanations, since one first came to reflective consciousness. After Webster's book, we can not only see that psychoanalysis is utterly without merit but also wake up out of it: Why Freud was wrong--at once a major intellectual biography and a signal contribution to the intellectual history of our times--is liberating. Towards the end of 20th century, Webster has lifted the incubus Freud placed, at the beginning of the century, on the minds of all those who think about their own, and human, nature. References 1. Webster R. Why Freud was wrong: sin, science and psychoanalysis. London: Harper Collins, 1995. 2. Esterson A. Seductive mirage: an exploration of the work of Sigmund Freud. Chicaco and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Books, 1993: 254. 3. Medawar PB. Victims of psychiatry. New York Review of Books 1975; Jan 23: 17. 4. Grunbaum A. The foundations of psychoanalysis: a philosophical critique. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 5. Standard Edition 2: 279-80, quoted in Crews F. The revenge of the repressed. The New York Review of Books, part I, Nov 17, 1994: 54-60; part II, Dec 1, 1994: 49-58. 6. Thornton EM. Freud and cocaine: the Freudian fallacy. London: Blond and Briggs, 1983. 7. Freud S. Project for scientific psychology. Available in: Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, Ernst Kris. The origins of psychoanalysis. Translated by Mosbacher E, Strachey J. London: Imago, 1954. 8. Feynman R. Cargo cult science. In: Surely you're joking Mr Feynman! London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1985. 9. Wilcocks R. Maelzel's chess player: Sigmund Freud and the rhetoric of deceit. Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994. 10. Masson J. The assault on truth: Freud's suppression of the seduction theory. New York: Viking-Penguin, 1985. 11. Malcolm J. In: The Freud archives. New York: Vintage Books, 1985. 12. Jones E. Sigmund Freud: life and works. 3 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1953-57. 13. Gellner E. The pschoanalytic movement. London: Paladin, 1985. 14. Malcolm J. Psychoanalysis: the impossible profession. London: Pan, 1982. 15. Tallis R. The strange case of Jacques L. PN Rev 1987; 14: 23-26. 16. Roudinesco E. Jacques Lacan, Esquisse d'une vie, histoire d'un systeme de pensee. Paris: Fayard, 1993. 17. Chapman AH, Chapman-Santana M. Is it possible to have an unconscious thought? Lancet 1994; 344: 1752-53. 18. Sartre J-P. Doing and having: existential psychoanalysis. In: Being and nothingness, translated by Barnes H. London: Methuen, 1957: 557-75. 19. Tallis R. The explicit animal. London: Macmillan, 1991. -> Alice4Mac 2.4.4 E QWK Hiya:05Nov94 Origin: ----------> Jack Sargeant, you look fabulist! --- PCBoard (R) v15.3/M 10 * Origin: MoonDog BBS þ RIME NetHub Brooklyn,NY (1:278/15) SEEN-BY: 112/4 218/701 890 1001 278/15 230 353/250 396/1 3615/50 51 @PATH: 278/230 3615/50 218/1001