Your piece couldn’t be more wrong. Any time you find yourself making grand generalizations and not citing a study at the end of it, you’re doing what you’re saying Freud didn’t do. And you’re right, HE didn’t verify his results with studies, but THOUSANDS of studies since then have proven a variety of aspects of his MANY theories (lay off the sexual repression, there was a lot more going on. Hit the books, man). For example, do you ever use the word ‘repression’ in your day to day life? Do you ever accuse people of ‘projecting’? Ever see a kid, or adult, ‘act out’? You’re employing essentially FREUDian concepts or offshoots that his students elaborated on when you do. There are psychoanalysis institutes and university sponsored longitudinal studies of these theories. Tons of them. How complicated do you think a species is that all has to poop every day, eat a few times, drink water, and be nursed and cared for for 10 times longer than any animal on the planet? Hit the books.
This only addresses part of your post, but it’s possible that we could frequently be using terms like “repression,” “projection,” and “acting out” without there being any good evidence for their ultimate usefulness as a description of human psychology. The only thing that their frequent use necessarily implies is that the terms and the model for human minds that they imply have seeped so far into general use that we find it hard to talk about human thought without using those terms. Consider the terms that would frequently be used for talking about human psychology in about 1800. The fact that they were common then doesn’t imply that they were ultimately useful either.
Please note that I am not addressing the overall issue of whether Freudian psychology is true or not. I am only talking about one argument that you are making. Regardless of whether other arguments for or against Freudian psychology are correct, I don’t think that this argument is correct.
Cite?
Sigmund Freud is a cancer on the heritage of western thought. See Terence Hines, *Pseudoscience and the Paranormal *(Prometheus Books, several editions).
Freudianism, like Method Acting, is what some people have instead of a religion; treat it gently.
And have you ever described somebody as melancholic or sanguine? Clearly, the medieval concept of bodily humors is dead-on accurate as well. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off for my bloodletting.
I guess when they were teaching hero worship in the high school psych class you took you never stopped to think that all of those terms and ideas predate Freud? Or that Freud didn’t invent psychology? And that he didn’t revolutionize it in any meaningful sense, just marketed it well and advanced concepts that set the field back about 100 years? Or that thousands of studies have shown that the key concepts of psychoanalytic theory have been proven wrong?
Except Cecil did cite studies, as you can see by reading his article:
Jeffrey Masson, The Assault on Truth, 1984.
Frederick Crews, The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute (1995)
Frederick Crews, Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend (1998)
You, on the other hand, have not cited any book or article in support of your position - shouldn’t you be the one hitting the books?
It is slightly possible the OP was referring to this article Whatever became of B. F. Skinner? - The Straight Dope in which Cecil does casually refer to Freud as a quack, without quoting sources, because it’s in the context of an article about BF Skinner.
Actually, many of the claims and treatments promoted by Freud weren’t just wrong but were actively harmful, particularly his advocation of the use of cocaine and sinus surgery as treatments for relatively benign neuroses, his theory of psychosexual development, and the claim of widespread repression of memories of infant sexual molestation that led to a rash of unsubstantiated allegations of sexual abuse. While Frued’s methodology influenced general psychotherapy, his method of psychoanalysis is widely regarded as being nearly worthless in the treatment of both neuroses and mental trauma. Freud falsified salient details of many case histories in order to substantiate his claims, and otherwise presented unfalsifiable theories that are at best non-scientific.
While Freud may have codified the theory of the psyche as id, ego, and superego, he was hardly the first to identify those as specific components. One need only read Shakespeare of the legend of Gilgamesh to see similar elements personified centuries before Freud practiced his particular brand of psychology.
Stranger