It’s rather sad whenever I read Cecil’s rants against Freud. His complete misunderstanding of Freud’s place in and contributions to the field of psychology. His ever insistence that this pioneer must have been either perfect or a quack. It’s along the lines of calling Leonardo da Vinci a quack for not getting the helicopter concept perfect. Sad. Really sad. I normally enjoy reading Cecil, but these anti-Freud bashings is getting so so sooo old. Does Cecil have some ax to grind? Or is he just out of new topics to talk about?
Then again, possibly Cecil just doesn’t think psychology is a bona fide scientific/academic field. It doesn’t appear he’s taken any psychology courses. I’m a behaviorist myself, but I still understand and respect Freud’s contribution to psychology. Oh wait. How silly of me. Cecil thinks behaviorism is also quackery as well. Oh well. I guess I’m just a quack defending a quack. I probably should now tear up and burn my degree in psychology.
Where Cecil is wrong, it seems to me, has to do with this complaint:
Who the hell ever claimed psychoanalysis was science? I guess Freudians do claim their conceptual model is empirically supported, but they don’t claim to be scientists describing the physical world. Nothing in the anatomy of the brain corresponds to the id, the ego or the superego; these and other concepts are useful ways of conceptualizing the workings of human emotion. They are not The Truth, they are a way of apprehending the psyche: the way they feel works best.
Then there’s this:
Not having been there during Freud’s own sessions with his patients, I can’t say much about them. But having been through sessions of my own when I was in psychoanalysis, I can pick a few nits. For one thing, free-associating is not “ignoring” the dream’s manifest content. On the contrary, the manifest content is the starting point of the free association. It’s like saying that opening a door and walking through it is ignoring the door.
It sounds as if Cecil would prefer a psychoanalyst to tell the patient what the manifest content of a dream means without the patient having to do more than describe the content; after all, isn’t that what the patient is paying for?
The answer is no. Psychoanalyis is not the reading of entrails. It isn’t the analyst who “determines” the patient’s problem and then convinces him or her of it. Rather, the analyst, based on an ongoing appreciation of what is revealed by the patient’s talk, hopes to nudge the patient in effective directions.
“Resistance” does happen, in fact it is commonplace in ordinary human interactions; for most people nowadays it goes under the term “denial” and anyone who has ever tried to sugges to a friend or relative that they have a problem, with drink, drugs, or interpersonal relations, has probably run up against it.
If an analyst is convinced a patient has a particular problem and the patient refuses to entertain the notion, what is the analyst to do?
Cecil, I think, in order to accept the validity of psychoanalysis, would like the analyst to be able to prove it to the patient, as a medical doctor can point to a staphyloccus germ under a microscope. Alas, this is not possible, for obvious reasons. Emotional problems and their history - for psychoanalysis is really about understanding the history of an individual’s feelings - are far too complex for that.
So the analyst can either make no attempt to persuade the patient, or can attempt to persuade the patient. The first option would be totally irresponsible - “I take your money, but make little effort to help you regardless of my informed opinion; if you don’t like the idea of what I suggest to you, I’ll just throw up my hands.” The second is clearly what one would expect from a specialist in whom one has placed one’s trust, but when that is what the analyst does, critics say the analyst is “bearing down until the analysand caves.” It isn’t a question of “caving,” it’s a question of being persuaded. And of course the patient is not always persuaded. Disagreements between analysts and analysands happen all the time; sometimes they result in the termination of an analysis, and sometimes not. In any case an analyst who browbeats and bullies is a poor analyst and should not be held up as the standard specimen.
A medical doctor can look at microbes under a microscope and say yes, you are infected with staphylocci; it’s a fact. Drugs that kill staphylocci will kill the staphylocci whether the patient believes it or not. In psychoanalysis you, the patient, do the work of undoing emotional knots which began to be tied early in life. You can go about untying those knots in a variety of ways. The analyst assists, and it is not even necessary to discuss the technicalities of psychoanalytic theory.
People’s understanding of their feelings toward their parents, for example, comes through feeling them and thinking and talking very directly about how those feelings feel, not discussing them theoretically. An analyst can say to a man, “you have issues with unresolved Oedipal feelings” - what the hell does that mean? Nothing, unless and until you feel the connection between how you felt as a boy about your parents and other feelings you have had throughout your life. You have to do this. You also have to trust the analyst, or at least give the analyst the benefit of the doubt, when he or she suggests there is further to go to get the full benefits of the analysis. If that trust does not exist the work of analysis that you are doing is rendered much more difficult. Clearly Cecil’s frank suspicion of the entire enterprise would make him a poor candidate for successful psychoanalytic therapy.
Cecil characterizes free association as “blather” from which the analyst self-servingly plucks words and images serving his or her interpretation. In this he extends his contempt for psychoanalysts to their patients, whose spontaneous expression he dismisses as meaningless. But one tenet of Freudian theory is that “whatever comes to mind” is not, as Cecil implies, random. On many occasions in my own analysis I found myself freely and spontaneously following lines of thought that did indeed lead to memories and feelings that “I had forgotten all about” and that did help me understand other, more recent feelings and my reactions to them.
Not everyone has a successful experience with psychoanalytic theory, just as no therapy works equally well with everyone. One could suggest that anyone who does have a successful experience has simply been manipulated by quacks, that the whole thing is just a placebo. There are undoubtedly quacks in all walks of life, and there are those who are suckered by quacks. Personally I feel I am pretty quack-resistant and skeptical in nature; my own experience of Freudian therapy was one that involved accepting no outlandish theories, as my analyst did not spout theory or attempt to “convince” me of anything with the arbitrary and bullying attitude Cecil portrays as Freud’s. We talked about my problems (the talking being perhaps 90% my own) and when I felt I had come to grips with them we ended the analysis.
In short, Cecil’s depiction of psychoanalysis is a parody and does not resemble my own experience or that of several people close to me who have embarked on psychoanalysis with, admittedly, varying degrees of success. It’s not easy and it’s not something that the analyst does to a passive vessel, as medical doctors administer medicine to patients who do no more than report symptoms. Cecil would seem to hope for something much less interactive - something that would relieve the analysand of any responsibility for the success of therapy.
Here comes another great debate, I guess. But, one way to see whether psychoanalysis and, particularly, Freud’s theories are valid would be to do some testing.
You could check the progress of patients receiving therapy from a Freudian psychoanalyst, a non-psychologist, and no therapy at all to see if the Freudian group is more successful than the other groups. It would be interesting to see a controlled study to find out if psychoanalysis is really effective (more effective than no psychoanalysis or just having good friends to talk to).
There are cases where it’s not safe (the other component of safe and effective) – I’m thinking of the implanted child abuse memories that were all the rage a few years back. But, I suppose, any treatment can be used for ill.
Often, people spend years in therapy and I suppose they may make progress. But, if I sustain an injury, I could spend years in psychoanalysis and I’ll show improvement. That doesn’t mean that psychoanalysis helped my physical injury – the body (and probably the mind) has ways of healing itself over time.
Without some sort of controlled study checking the safety and effectiveness of psychoanalysis as a treatment for mental disorders, it’s hard to defend as anything other than quackery. Do those studies exist?
Calling Freud a quack is a statement of fact. He passed off pseudoscience as science. He was also very influential, and had a strong effect on the world, which was probably mostly positive. So that makes him an influential, mostly positive quack.
Look, Cecil actually got it more right than he even knows.
This has occurred, and can be found in the book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. This therapy has been around for 50+ years, and is the only effective way to address unwanted emotions and psychosomatic ills in existence. It’s sold over 20 million copies worldwide, but has, unfortunately, been much maligned.
The fact is it works. I have personally used it for years. It actually gets to the root of the problems and eliminates them.
I have, using the techniques, helped a medical student get over a reaction he had to the sight of blood. He would vomit and break out in a cold sweat, which is a big problem for a med student. He was going to flunk out as he couldn’t do a basic doctoring action. It took about 7-8 hours of work, and he was over the whole thing, and has been a successful doctor for over a decade now.
I’ve seen a girl who had an abusive father (not sexually) go from being mousy and introverted to being outgoing and vibrant. Others have had aches and pains disappear they never thought possible. I recall one woman come out from a session smiling and repeatedly rotating her arm above her head. She beamed and said she hadn’t been able to raise that arm above her shoulder for over 40 years. Fact is, no matter what the unwanted condition, something can be done about it.
This is all done without any argument or need to convince a patient of anything. No need to implant memories or suggest what happened. When you do know the actual structure of the mind you can be effective. It is contained in the book, it’s much simpler than ever suspected and it doesn’t have any resemblance to Freud’s structure. Cecil nailed it right on the head.
Freud was a quack. There is no evidence to suggest that dreams are the expression of latent thoughts. There is no evidence that the ID, Ego and Superego were anything more than a humanistic expression of God and the Devil. His psychosexual theory of human development has no basis in objective reality.
Psychology can be scientific. Learning theories have been grounded in objective evaluation. Cognitive psychology has been applied to the development of artificial intelligence. But there is nothing scientific about psychoanalysis.
Freud violated his own ethics by having affairs with patients, accepting bribes to manipulate patients, etc. We can learn far more about Freud from his theories than we can about the human condition. Given all of this, I think it is fair to call Freud a quack. He got plenty wrong (penis envy? Anyone want to defend that?), was unethical by his own standards, and was responsible for the proliferation of absurd claims that probably have done more harm than good.
And on the issue of the benefits of psychoanalysis, have there been any controlled studies that show psychoanalysis actually helps people?
I doubt that book “nailed it right on the head;” the fact is, we really don’t understand the brain much at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if that book got it more right than Freud, but I doubt it produced explicit diagrams of everything the brain does. If it did, it would have been much more famous than it is. I have to agree completely with Cecil on this one: Freud had a great, almost certainly true revelation when he gave the world his theories about unconscious modules, but most of the rest of his work is quackery. I disagree completely with you, Tom, that “nothing in the anatomy of the brain corresponds to the id, the ego or the superego.” I think, rather, that if we want to understand the brain, we should try to understand the physical workings of it, like all other sciences do. Yes, empirical psychology often works, but it also sometimes gives us jokes like Freud’s theory that every single urge is, deep down, a sexual one. How could something like that have evolved?
I have to agree with Twin Tatto. Cecil seems overly critical of Freud. Perhaps he has Freud-Complex, secretly obsessed but outwardly resentful. Was his mother a Freudian?
Seriously though, it seems unfair to apply today’s standards to a pioneer of an entire field of study.
I found Cecil’s denunciation of Freud very irritating, but not because I have any particular desire to defend Freud, whose influence on 20th century thought was, on the whole, pernicious. It’s because he blithely says that Freud fails the “essential test of a true science - that is, it does not produce propositions that, in principle, can be shown to be false”.
Falsifiablilty is not the “essential test of a true science”, and if it were, no science would stand up. Falsifiability was the central platform of one particular philosophy of science - that of Karl Popper. Popper, however, was responding to the skeptical accusation that no number of observations could ever confirm a theory, since the number of actual observations divided by the number of possible observations that could be made to support a theory is infinite, thus leading to the probability that the theory is true of 0. This is a skeptical argument going back as far as Hume.
Popper responded that while affirmations could never be proven, they could be refuted conclusively. The problem with this claim is that scientific claims are always relative to the underlying state of knowledge.
The naivety of this view is demonstrated by the fact that so much of what we now take to be common sense was once taken to be obviously wrong by people in earlier times. It once seemed ridiculous, for example, to claim that it was possible to sail around the world, because you would obviously fall off as soon as you reached the equator. Now, of course, we understand the concept of force, and with it, the force of gravity, and have the luxury of treating Columbus’ detractors as idiots.
Popper claimed that his philosophy represented scientific practice, (and some scientists went so far as to base their approach on his views), but it doesn’t - science simply does not proceed through “conjectures and refutations”, as he claimed. In fact, scientific method is much harder to defend on rational grounds than many people imagine, which has lead some philosophers to claim that scientific progress is fundamentally irrational. This is an extreme view, but it has arisen because the success of scientific method against other ways of understanding the world is so hard to explain.
All of which doesn’t say much about Freud. But the problem with Freud isn’t that his claims aren’t falsifiable. It also isn’t that he was wrong about many things, since all scientists are wrong about many things. (As late as the 1920s, astronomers thought that the swirling clouds that they saw were nascent solar systems close by. Now we know they are galaxies far away. But we don’t dismiss these astronomers as quacks simply because they were wrong.)
To be a quack, a person must “pretend to have medical knowledge.” (New Lexicon Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language (1989)) The on line Merriam-Webster site uses the synonym “charlatan.” It is not certain that a “quack” has to be a “fraud” in the true sense of the word, because fraudulent behaviour involves an intent to decieve, whereas a “quack” might really believe what he is doing has value.
Did Freud “pretend to have medical knowledge?” Nothing that Unca Cece cites in his article discusses any lack of medical knowledge on the part of Freud. Instead, the Master asserts that Freud was a “quack” because he pretended to scientific methodology when, in fact, his methods were completely unscientific. In short, Cecil is calling Freud a scientific quack, a pretender to scientific methodology.
rparkes fails to understand the concept Cecil is trying to apply to define science. The test of scientific thought is not whether at any moment the hypotheses presented can or cannot be proved false, but rather whether the hypotheses can ever be stated to be true or false on the basis of empirical data. Here, it isn’t important whether a particular hypothesis is correct or not; it is whether the assertion has verifiability. The debate about “creationism” centers around this issue: can the assertions of the creationists truly be tested through application of reason to actual data? (note, PLEASE don’t start a creationist debate over this assertion; if you want to discuss theology, go to Great Debates!) So the issue isn’t: Can Freud’s theories be presently proven by empirical data? It is: Can Freud’s theories EVER be proven false by ANY amount of empirical data? Cecil asserts that the answer to this question is, “no.” The Freudian practitioner derives a hypothesis, for example, that certain behaviour derives from certain occurrences in infanthood. The practitioner procedes to obtain confirmation of this hypothesis through analyzing the responses of patients to questions designed to provide an understanding of the cause of the patient’s difficulties. Where the process breaks down is that the “results” are defined by the practitioner, who uses the responses to determine what additional questions are asked, then interprets these results to refine even further the attempt to extract data. This is not science.
To anaolgize to a true science, suppose that an early astronomer decides to test a hypothesis that Mars orbits the earth. He trains his telescope on the heavens, and notes the position of Mars on ten successive nights. Based on his observations, he then determines that he need only look at Mars on certain nights thereafter, those nights being the nights on which the position of Mars is of any value to the issue: all other data about Mars’ position is irrelevant to the issue, he concludes. Then he takes the data on the nights considered important, fits them to his theory about relative motion, sees they agree, and asserts this means Mars circumnavigates Terra.
Now, such an astronomer would never get far, because other astronomers would be able to obtain the ignored data and use it to prove or disprove the hypothesis. But in the case of psychoanalysis, there is no ability for other psychoanalysts to disprove the conclusions of the person making the hypothesis. While they might reach other conclusions based on their own questioning, they can’t point to any specific data and say: “these answers prove that the hypothesis is false.” They are left with the less palatable option of arguing interpretation. This is NOT science.
It seems to me that it is much more likely that the scientific investigations initiated by and inspired by Dr. John Hopfield of Princeton will be more likely to provide a scientific explanation of how the mind works. Reducing the mind to quantum interactions, treating it as it is, a massive interaction of sub-atomic particles, we begin to comprehend just what makes the mind think. While we may never comprehend the entire complexity of the brain, we at least will be able to procede on such investigations in a truly scientific fashion.
Are you sure you understand what “falsifiability” is? I do not think it means what you seem to think it means.
This has nothing at all to do with “falsifiability”. The idea that “the earth is flat” CAN be 100% scientific, even if it is 100% false. It’s very simple:
Try to reach the edge. If no edge is found but one returns to ones starting point without changing course, one has falsified the contention that the earth is flat.
“Scientific” is NOT identical with “true”.
It is only “hard to explain” to people who would rather we all fumble around in a world of pure conjecture and deduction therefrom and foreswear actually TESTING hypotheses.
Actually, that is a significant problem with Freud. What distinguishes Freud’s theories from any other religious dogma? A religion does not have to have a “god-figure”, after all.
We don’t dismiss them because they stated their theories in such a way as to permit people to actually TEST their theories. Freud’s dogmas, on the other hand, cannot be subject to test, even in theory. They are presented as from “on high” and it is not possible to either confirm nor deny them. They are essentially tenets of a religion.
However, psychoanalysts learn their trade in departments of “psychology”, which is held to be a science, not a religion. Were psychoanalysis taught in seminaries and presented as a religion, then it would be less vulnerable to the accusation of quackery.
Kudos for Cecil sticking to his guns. There is virtually no credible scientific evidence to support most of Freud’s hypotheses and what evidence there is usually contradicts them, leaving the lingering Freud supporters to to weave even more complex webs of rationalization.
That said, Freud posited some interesting ideas that have led ultimately to productive research in the science (yes, science) of psychology.
As for Dianetics, it is science fiction and nothing more, and unlike Freud’s work has led to no scientific advances whatsoever.
That defenders of Freud and defenders of Dianetics sound so much alike is indicative of how different types of quackery breed similarly unreasoned loyalty among adherents, and how deeply complex most people’s raw emotional reactions are not.
Well, thank you both for proving my point about it being maligned. I can know from your response that you’ve not read Dianetics, but rather articles about it.
Having worked with it for over 13 years I can state I’ve never seen it fail to improve conditions of those who have used it. It helps people. IQ raises, reaction time decreases, it enables people to accomplish more in a given time, etc.