This is not a question about the man topic of Cecils’ article on B.F. Skinner, but a question about his brief characterization of Sigmund Freud as a “quack” at the end so I am placing the question here. I know it has now been shown that Freud was way off base on some of his assumptions, but I thought that he was fairly well regarded overall as an insightful pioneer in exploring the nature of consciousness and how this related to behavior.
Has Freud now really been demoted to a mere “quack” by history?
My experience, as someone with a bachelor’s in psych, is that his ideas weren’t bad based on what was known at the time, but it would be silly to stick to those same theories today.
There’s no way to determine whether a person’s behavior is actually the result of specific events or psychological drives as Freud suggested. As such, his ideas were not falsifiable.
Additionally, the theories worked extremely well in hindsight. Given any known history, Freud could generate explanations that seemed to account for the subject’s behavior. But their predictive power was virtually nil.
Freud was good at generating interesting, new ideas, and his willingness to acknowledge that much of human cognition occurs without conscious awareness was revolutionary.
But he verged on the merely mystic, was unconcerned about whether his ideas could be verified, and generated explanations without data.
His theories were also widely abused; while fairness requires that we acknowledge that wasn’t his fault, it’s tarnished his reputation.
I like to compare him to the early 19th century Egyptologists. He went into a very dark place, and tried to bring it to light. Alas, his tools were inadequate, and he didn’t know where he was going, and so he did quite a bit of damage.
But, damn it, no one else had gone there yet. Everyone else at the time was making worse mistakes! He tried to apply the rules of science.
A quack? No, no more than Newton for believing in alchemy. Quackery involves intent to deceive, something you cannot even begin to accuse Freud of.
Hindsight is a marvelous thing; please don’t judge Freud solely by its light.
First off, just as an aside – Murfreesboro is my home town! Saluuut!
(I’ve been waiting for months to mention that.)
*Actually, that’s not entirely correct. It’s also a good example of how convoluted the issue of Freud really is.
In fact, Freud had both male and female patients who complained of being victims of incest in his early practice. This led him to his original theory about the origin of hysteria: he believed it was caused by a premature “awaking” of the sex drive, which was caused in its turn by precocious sex play. Not all the perpetrators of incest in Freud’s original case studies were parents, by the way; many were caretakers or even older siblings.
Freud called this his seduction theory. I believe that he actively maintained it for something like a year and a half, during the latter half of the 1890s. He eventually abandoned it, though. He gave conflicting accounts of why he did so; his most well-known reason was that he had begun to discover that all of his patients had memories of childhood seduction. That wasn’t so surprising, really, since his technique, in the beginning, involved pressing his hand to his patient’s forehead and assuring them that they would soon remember something of a “sexual nature” (approximately). So to be technically correct, if Freud was bullying anybody, he was bullying patient’s who hadn’t suffered incest into admitting that they had.
Masson has written a book about Freud’s decision to abandon the theory, and claimed that he did so because he didn’t dare to face the repercussions. I strongly disagree with that; Freud might have been a “quack,” but he wasn’t afraid of controversy.
Freud treated patients who claimed to have been the victims of childhood incest after they were adults. I suspect going to the police and reporting a incest that occurred 20 years previously would be a waste of time in fin de sicle Vienna. I don’t think he treated anyone who was undergoing abuse while in analysis. astro:
If your definition of quack is “* a person who pretends, professionally or publicly, to skill, knowledge, or qualifications he or she does not possess; a charlatan*,” then Freud wasn’t a quack, technically, but he was kinda…”quacky”? He tended to produce very speculative theories, his clinical work almost invariably “confirmed” those theories by its very nature, and he clung tenaciously and dogmatically to his ideas, sometimes even in the face of strong contrary evidence.
Newton was a scientist, which was one of the reasons his writings on alchemy and mathematical mysticism didn’t come to light until his death. Although the modern standards of science hadn’t yet been formulated, he understood the concepts and applied them.
Freud was not a scientist. He didn’t apply scientific standards to his patients. But his theories were considered “scientific” by the general populace, and that’s what lead to a great deal of their harm.
Freud made one pretty important discovery, and that was psychotherapy. Talk therapy is a boon to the anxious and troulbed, directing them to examine the sources of thier feelings in an abstracted environment. I count myself among many people who were fortunate enough to have a gifted healer to talk to when needed.
I think where he failed most laughably was in trying to construct a theoretical system. I mean, seriously, one has to pity all those who had to digest such drivel as id, ego, and super-ego as if they were things like nuetrons, protons and hadrons (no, hadrons)
The best example is his deranged idea of “penis envy”, i.e. that young girls feel inadequate because they “lack” that special something. Its quite the opposite, of course, we feel such terrible shame at possessing a penis that we are constantly seeking to hide it, preferably somewhere dark, safe, and warm.
Well, that’s certainly true. Psychotherapy is pretty nifty, although modern psychotherapy has progressed far beyond Freud’s version.
The problem is that Freud stumbled onto it completely by accident. He was interested in hypnosis, but wasn’t good enough at it, so he needed a substitute procedure for his patients to undergo. He tried a primitive version of psychotherapy and found that it seemed to help.
Ironically, if Freud had been a bit more competent, he wouldn’t have developed psychotherapy at all. As it was, he mainly focused on psychoanalysis.
Which are terms Freud didn’t actually use. He just used the terms “das Es”, “das Ich” and “das Uberich” (the it, the I, and the over-I) The guy who translated his work into English figured it would be more professional if he translated the words into Latin, I guess.
the thing about penis envy, it might be silly now with women haveing roughly equal rights… but back in that day I imagin many women would rather of been men.
Psychotherapy works? Not really. It makes ppl feel better but it doesnt cure anything. Going on a cruise makes ppl feel better and I could just as well talk to an engineer to get things of my chest. My psychology teachers agree for the most part.