Freud's Relevance and Non-Quackery

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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This column http://tinyurl.com/hferhlcwas written in 2003, so hopefully Cecil has learned a bit. More specifically, learned that a tremendous amount was known about unconscious mental processes when he wrote that column.

Since my PhD is in Cognitive Science and my research focused on language comprehension in what is known as the “online” sense, taking measuring responses in differences of milliseconds during the reading process, we’ll go with language.

Learning a language is not the evidence for unconscious mental processes in humans: using language in general is almost entirely unconscious. When Cecil writes his columns, almost everything he does is unconscious. Learning to type is a process of turning a conscious series of behaviors - selecting the right keys to pressed to spell a word - into an unconscious series of behaviors. No more looking at the keyboard, hopefully a massive increase in speed from a dozen or so words a minute to many dozens.

If you’ve ever tried to learn another language, you’ve probably learned about all sorts of elements in that other language that differ from your first language. You’ve learned what they’re called, and you’ve tried to learn how to make these discriminations in your new language as automatic as that of your first language. That process makes you aware of just how much of the “grammar” of your language is not part of your awareness when you use your language. You had plenty of knowledge about how to use your language, but that knowledge was unconscious until you encountered a situation where you had to learn a different way of expressing things.

This was Freud’s lasting accomplishment. Plenty was known about unconscious behavior at Freud’s time, and for eons prior. Non-human animals could engage in complex behavior, and this was considered unconscious complex behavior (this status is somewhat debatable). But in Freud’s time, psychologists were rigorously studying the behavior of animals in various situations to better understand how learning worked. No one thought that the pigeon that learned to associate the red light with “food is coming” and the green light with “loud noise is coming” was learning anything in a conscious manner.

But Freud was one of the main influences leading people to recognize that their behavior was, in very many ways, as unconscious as those of a pigeon.

Now falsifiability. Freud did propose falsifiable hypotheses. One of these is central to Cecil’s column, Freud’s seduction theory. Freud hypothesized that many adult anxieties and other mental troubles were due to infantile sexual abuse. Freud discussed this with his patients, who in turn accused their parents of having abused them. Their parents rejected this charge of abuse to the extent that Freud and his patients believed those parents were truthful. This resulted in Freud considering his seduction theory to be incorrect, and he admitted so.

Hypothesis -> testing -> absence of supporting data -> rejection of hypothesis.

There are other elements of Freud’s work that have been presented in a falsifiable manner, and supported or rejected by Freud or others, or accepted in a revised form. Many of Freud’s mental defense mechanisms (displacement, projection) fall into the category of “sorta true”. But the specifics of a scientist’s theories are often revealed to be only sorta true over decades or centuries. Einstein (and others) determined that Newton’s laws of motion were sorta true, as others did with regard to his research on optics. On the other hand, chemists determined that Newton’s massive compilation of theories and evidence for his alchemical beliefs were essentially false.

So Freud is more defensible than many outside of the field of psychology give him credit for, and even experimental researchers on language know this.

Another area where Freud’s thoughts retain utility are his more anthropological writings, like those on religion expressed in The Future of an Illusion. A lot of it is in the sorta true category, but many people would be happy to contribute to science important information that is considered to be sorta true a century later.

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And then on the other hand, Freud was a dead end in psychiatry, popularising ideas that turned out to be not just false, but destructive, and, along the way, “falsifying” true true facts, like that unpleasent truth that some of his partients were distressed because they had been sexually assulted by members of their family.

The unfortunate influence of Freud still pops up from time to time, particularly in American psychiatry. I was just reading, again, someone expressing supprise that alcoholics are more sensitive to alcohol than non-alcoholics.documented for the last 100 years, people are still influenced by the Freudian notion that people “compensated” for there problems: that extroverts are "comopensting for their introversion, that alcoholics are “compensating” for their lack of alcoholic reaction, and, most destructively, that treating the symptoms of mental illness (which are the patients attempts to “compensate” for the underlying disabiity), will just cause the underlying illness to break out in new and possibly even more debilitating symptoms.

The Freudian unwillingness to treat symptoms kept American treatment of Bipolar and Psychotic illness back for 20 years, and caused immense suffering.

On a lighter note, it also caused rift between Scientology and psychiatry: the psychiatrists were convinced that any treatment of mental illness was destructive: the Scientologists were convinced that modern psychiatry was destructive. The psychiatrists where right about the Scientologists, but only because the Scientologists adopted a form of “talking treatment” adopted from Freudian ideas. And the Scientologists were right about the Psychiatrists – but, of course, only because the Psychiatrists were advocating a kind of Freudian “talking treatment”

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bowlweevils: Thank you for writing this! I wanted to post something in defense of Freud, but you did an infinitely better job than I could have.

I’ve had the pleasure of speaking to psychiatrists upon various occasions, and I’ve always made a point to ask them what they thought of Freud. All of them (okay, not many) have spoken with respect of him and his pioneering work. They acknowledge that he was wrong in many respects…but so were a lot of other people. Newton and Galileo also made a few blunders. Freud tried to light the way into a vast darkness, and, while he may have made his errors and boners, he did not entirely fail.

As to “quack,” certainly not. That implies intentional falsification. A quack knows damn well he is a quack. At very worst Freud was self-deceived. At best, he opened up a new area in the sciences, and made a handful of elementary observations no one had ever made before.

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I just wanted to point out a typo in the column:

I don’t know where a hat came into it.

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I kinda thought the “pseudoscience” comment was a little overboard … just how empirical was psychology in the late 19th Century? When did we stop treating mental illness by burning at the stake? As **Trinopus ** points out, there was no intent to defreud people, it was an honest attempt to help. Do we condemn Leonhard Euler today because he studied magic squares?

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ISWYDT – and love it! :slight_smile:

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Euler’s studies of magic squares were mathematically sound. OTOH, I am perfectly comfortable condemning Newton for his obsessions with alchemy and witchcraft.

The basic principals of scientific empiricism were fairly well established by the time Freud was working in the 19th century. Freud certainly deserves credit for being a principal founder of western scientific thought about the human mind. But he deserves a great deal of condemnation for his methods, which largely consisted of the time-honored practice of “making shit up.” His vociferous rejection of a medical model of mental illness and his insistence that psychosis, depression, and mania could be successfully treated by thoughtfully reasoning about one’s anus led to generations of needless suffering. His influence permeates the less-rigorous subfields of mental health science to this day. FFS, there are dozens of schools still churning out newly-minted “psychoanalysts” in the United States to this day. They’re like chiropractors for your psyche.

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I have a great deal of difficulty finding anything positive or respectful to say about Freud and his silly-ass theories.

At best, I will grudgingly note the possibility that some of the observations he made about motivations that are opaque to the person so motivated are things we sort of take for granted, and maybe those were highly unusual notions before he popularized them.

But yeah he was a quack (and should not be echoed).

I was forced to plow through Civilization and Its Discontents and thus presented with the notion that when guys see a bonfire burning, they have a strong desire to piss it out, and that the reason civilization exists is that guys managed to suppress that inclination. WTF.

Tangentially, one thing about him that annoys me isn’t even about him and his peculiar notions. Every time I get into an argument about the efficacy or the scientific foundation of medical-model “chemical imbalance” theories of psychiatric ailments, the supporters of THAT flavor of quackery loudly denounce Freud. As if in order for Siggy to be wrong, anyone with a dissenting theory just has to be correct. That’s a binary proposition that the scientology folks (i.e. batshit insane theory #3) also try to use. Yeesh.

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just how empirical was psychology in the late 19th Century?

Plenty empirical. Scientific research on psychophysics had been going on since the 1830s. This was the study of the perception of physical phenomena, like sound, light, pain, touch… you get the point.

If you want to pick out one incredibly important development, it’s signal detection theory. The examination of the accuracy of, well, detecting a signal within a variable context - the strength of the signal and the noisiness of the context. This is done in a systematic way, addressing the four categories of responses. First, true positives, there is a target and the target is detected. Second, true negatives, there is no target and the subject determines that there is no target. Third, false positives, where the subject claims there is a target but there is none. Fourth, false negatives, there is a target, but it is not detected.

Signal detection theory is so thoroughly embedded in our relationship with complex technology that it’s hard to think of it as a psychological discovery/development. At it’s most important, it’s the procedure to decide whether to launch nuclear missiles or not. On a more everyday level, it’s critical to air traffic control procedures. So it’s fundamental to most monitoring and safety systems, as well as the evaluation of the efficacy of new products like medicines. But think about it, and it’s a common component of things like video games, trying to figure out if your parents will know you got home late or not…

The power of signal detection theory is magnified when base rate likelihood estimates are taken into account. The likelihood of a true positive or a false positive depends on how many true events there actually are, and deviations in judgment from these base rates are often important measures of skill or culpability. You don’t want your radar monitor thinking that flocks of birds are incoming missiles, or that incoming missiles are flocks of birds, though you do want to increase the likelihood that your enemy will make these sorts of mistakes.

It’s also far too commonly forgotten in many everyday judgment processes. Much quackery of the psychic phenomena industry derives from directing focus to the few accurate guesses in a context of thousands of failed predictions. Or the likelihood that the strange shadow is a sasquatch rather than a deer despite the fact that deer are extremely common, even if sasquatches do exist (the ability of a given area to support medium sized herbivores is much greater than the ability to support large omnivores).

Many people consider themselves to be great judges of character of other people, or able to detect lies, when they generally lack evidence of their false positives (insisting that their belief that someone has lied is always valid) and false negatives (liars who got away with it). When you put people through a true signal detection analysis test of lie detection, you find that there is no group of people, no matter how well trained, who can detect lies better than chance, despite the millions of dollars that have been spent trying to find methods, and the massive harm done by use of torture and threats that generate false positives that are believed to be true confessions.

Then you have the research on classical and operant conditioning. Again, these methods are so fundamental to systems of behavior modification and training that it can be hard to see them as psychological discoveries.

Finally, though it was a later development, there’s standardized testing. This has resulted in the reorganization of modern societies, though its original killer app was killing - the sorting of military recruits into various categories. This was obviously combined with conditioning processes and evaluation through performance in signal detecting situations to radically change warfare from the front lines to the chow lines.

So, yes, there was a tremendous amount of empirical scientific psychological research and development in the 19th century. As with Freud and psychoanalysis, much of this research was performed by Germans. Much of it by the Prussian/German Empire that was much more successful in shaping the history of the world from the mid 19th century to the mid 20th century than the Austrian area of the German world.

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Well said. I once had a professor who described Freud’s talent or lack thereof by stating that much of his theory was ill conceived, but there was no one better as a diagnostician.

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Some kind of Freudian slip?