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January 2-15, 2018
The "New York Review of Books" and the "London Review of
Books" have both recently published Freud-apologist pieces.
This one is not even
the most egregious
of the bunch...
Lisa Appignanesi reviewed Frederick Crews'
"Freud: The Making of an Illusion"
in the October 26, 2017 issue of the NYRB:
[ref]
Appignanesi accuses Crews of pummeling a straw-man:
"The idealization of Freud the man that
Crews is so keen to prove a blinding Indeed, Crews repeatedly
illusion is hardly prevalent. Most makes the point that
scholars, commentators, and even analysts present-day psychologists
don't need it to make use of Freud's and psycotherpists have no
insights ... " use for Freud.
She then goes on to sketch out those "insights" in
glowing terms:
"... Freud's insights into the opacity and
unpredictability of the human mind, or the
ways in which love and hate coexist, or how THE_FREUD_SYNDROME
our childhoods echo through us, sometimes
trapping us, or how our identifications with
early figures in our lives shape the
complicated humans we become. Or perhaps
most important, how much we share with those
whom we casually label with the many
diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)."
This is the kind of logic I'm coming to expect from
Freud-folks: "no one would ever idealize Freud like
that-- except me, right now."
This short list of insights skips the many
things where we would say Freud was
dubious or flat-out wrong, from the Were Freud a guy
penis-envy theory to the Oedipus complex. who just claimed
to be a philosopher,
But far more importantly it ignores that the we might read him
case against Freud is not that he never ever as we read someone
said anything of interest, but that he like Nietzsche,
continually dressed up his "insights" as looking for some sort
science claiming proof that was often of poetic truth among
fabricated, and lying about having a record the all the odd
of clinical success arising from his assertions.
treatments.
Appignanesi has been making remarks The exchange in 2011:
like the above for some time and <A HREF="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/12/08/freud-question-exchange/">[ref]</A>
some years earlier (in 2011) Crews
responded to them:
"Some of Freud's misty pronouncements about
'instinct' and 'the unconscious' can be
analogized to actual findings, but that is
unsurprising, as he speculated broadly and
took no pains to avoid self-contradiction."
Crews goes on, going for the jugular:
"This collapse could prompt historians to return
to Freud's career and ask what the empirical
basis of his tenets was, how he checked for
error and excluded rival explanations, and how
he dealt with objections by skeptical
colleagues. But no satisfactory answers would be
found. The defense mechanisms, 'dream work,' and
symbol code that Freud claimed to have unearthed
were his own devices for twisting every
patient's words into support for arbitrary
postulates and interpretations. As for his
wondrous breakthroughs, we have only his
self-dramatizing word for them; and for
corroboration we have only his question-begging
assurances that 'psychoanalytic experience' had
proved him right. Freud imagined himself a
second Darwin, but he had more in common with
Walter Mitty."
But back to 2017, and the review at hand...
Lisa Appignanesi goes on to say:
"Indeed, the Freud illusion was only prevalent in the
United States from the 1950s until about 1968."
So... Freudianism only lasted a
generation or so? A con-artist put over
his pseudo-scientific doctrine for just Not incidentally, Crews also got
short of twenty years in the US, and involved in the fight against the
we're supposed to wonder why any of us "assisted memory" scam in the
wonder about this? 1990s, arguing with some justice,
I think, that the attitudes on
display were echoes of Freud's
schtick.
It would seem to be a very
weak line to take that
there's nothing here anyone
but a crazed anti-Freud
fanatic would care about in
this day and age.
Appignanesi brings up the fact that the
British Royal Society inducted Freud into
it's ranks of scientists in 1938.
She doesn't seem to realize that this could
be taken as a clear sign that many intelligent
people who should've known better were conned
by Freud, and this had been going on for many
years-- it wasn't just in the US in the 50s.
Instead Appignanesi tries to use this fact
in an argument-from-authority style, implying
that if the Royal Society thought he was cool,
there must've been something worthwhile there.
Appignanesi explains the reasoning of the Royal Society
(and if you suspect that she's putting words in their
mouths, well, only a churlish fellow-- like myself--
would make such a base accusation):
"Why had this elite scientific body decided to name Freud to
its ranks? The citation certificate reads 'for pioneering work
in psychoanalysis.' The ever-disputatious fellows, with their
long view of history, knew that science is not a narrow domain
whose residents, like adherents of a strict religion, follow
one rigid set of eternal rules, but rather a capacious and
diverse mansion where observation of not only the animal but
also the human world could count as science, where doubters
could live side by side and engage in heated argument."
See, they like having con-artist quacks
around because they're so much fun to debate.
Appignanesi goes on to make the-- quite correct--
point that the practice of science is not some a
rigid doctrine engraved in stone, but I don't think
that works as a catch-all excuse for every
intellectual abuse made in the name of science...
Appignanesi invokes a remarkably bad example that
doesn't make the point she wants it to at all:
"... scientists are not uniformly consistent either in
their ideas or in their lives. Nor is it always clear
how one shapes the other. Newton, who had formulated
the laws of motion and universal gravitation, was also
a mystic with beliefs strange even for his time, and
behaved fraudulently in a dispute with Leibniz."
Myself I'm not up on Newton's priority
disputes with Leibniz, but whatever it says
about Newton's character, whether we call it
the Newton calculus or the Newton-Leibniz has
little bearing on whether it works, which it Is the idea is that because
clearly does. (At least this is a priority smart people have said dumb
dispute over something real.) things, you can't complain
about anyone saying dumb
things?
Newton may have been wrong
Further, we don't revere Newton's ideas about some things, he
on physics and math because we revere may have lied about some
Newton-- his long-standing obsession things, but Freud was wrong
with pseudo-scientific doctrines such as and lied about the main
alchemy is a well-known quirk of things.
intellectual history. If Newtonian
physics relied on alchemy it would a much
less impressive achievement, but it
simply doesn't-- the two aspects of
Newton's work compartmentalize quite
neatly. Though admittedly, like most
I have not read Newton in the
original-- if you can make the
The idea would have to be that case that alchemy had some
Freud has some great insights influence on his scientific
that are independent of his thinking, that would be
crazy stuff-- so then, there are interesting, but once again
two questions (1) can you take just an odd quirk of history.
the good without the bad, and
(2) is any of the good original That Newton liked some crazy
with Freud? shit doesn't excuse crazy shit.
Crews repeatedly responds "no" on
both points, and myself, without
studying Freud more deeply--
something I see little reason to
do-- I trust Crews more than an
obvious apologist like Appignanesi.
Appignanesi also likes the "things-were-different-then"
maneuver, which I might give to her... but there's
still something funny about this:
"Crews, by contrast, seems to idealize science
and even to dehistoricize it, forgetting that
at the time Freud began his practice, dangerous
patent medicines were touted by many doctors in
the US; clinical trials of drugs were not
instituted until 1947."
Is the idea "sure it was snake-oil, but there was
lots of snake-oil around back then!"? The
thing is this particular snake-oil wasn't
just a passing fad of the unschooled masses, it
was a widespread delusion that persisted for
decades and infected many of the people who were
supposed to be our brightest and most intelligent.
Arguably (with all due apologies to the Royal
Society) Freud set back the development of psych
(-ology and/or -therapy) for many years.
This however is where I think things get interesting:
"[Crews] aim is to reveal that much of Freud's writing
on dreams, screen memories (or memories that hide deeper
or older memories), love, sex, and marriage is more
autobiographical than we already know. His Freud is
utterly solipsistic, never actually drawing on patients
or any human and social observation. So Freud's essays
on sex, love, and marriage (1908, 1910-1911) are built
on his own case, not on more general behavior. Yet his
Viennese contemporaries, like Arthur Schnitzler and
Stefan Zweig-- as well as early feminists who decry the
lack of education, including sexual education, for women
at the time-- paint a picture of life that corresponds
to Freud's descriptions."
So the claim here would be that if
Freud's material seems outlandishly
dubious to us, it's because we're The other way you could take
ignorant of conditions back around this though, is that Freud's
the turn of the century, and various confusions and
humanity (if perhaps not "human prejudices were simply fairly
nature") was much different then. common and shared with the
other thinkers of the time.
I wonder if we might
take that line of
thought farther:
SEXREP_TO_SEXREV
Appignanesi continues with her
lowering-the-bar approach:
"... Dora didn't commit suicide, as her parents
were worried she might; nor did Freud's other
patients. That may not be a miraculous result,
but neither is it a total failure, as anyone
working in today's challenging mental health As long as the
environment would surely agree." suckers don't die,
it's all good.
And this is absolutely fabulous:
"Freud, unlike many in his time, at least
acknowledged that women's voices were worth
listening to-- that women were sexual beings
with desires."
Calling Freud's approach "listening to women" is a
bit of a stretch... it was more like "listening
to women, and then making up shit about what they
said".
This is also a good one:
"Crews chooses not to give any positive accounts
of analysis with Freud, but there have been By the way:
notable ones, not least from the American poet Salome was Nietzsche's
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and the Russian-born pick for dominatrix
writer and psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salome'." (she evidently
declined the honor).
You know, you can find many people who swear by
their own favorite snake-oil. Anecdotes are good Intellectual
places to start, but... histories always
skip the
important stuff.
This is another interesting one, but even if
completely accurate, I'm afraid it's just another
variation of "hey, there's lots of other
snake-oil out there, too":
"The recent exposure of the extent to
which negative evidence in clinical If this is all true,
trials of much-hyped psychoactive drugs it's quite an inditement
was massaged away with the help of of modern science and
doctors on pharmaceutical company medicine.
payrolls, the way clinical results
highlighted only what would prove But medicine isn't
profitable, the masking of side effects, supposed to be about
suicide among them-- all this has made choosing the least
the purported misdeeds of psychoanalysts harmful ineffective
look benign." remedy.
Appignanesi references: Wish a pox upon
"See Marcia Angell's articles in these drug-therapy if you
pages, among them 'Drug Companies & like, but it says
Doctors: A Story of Corruption,' January little about
15, 2009; 'The Epidemic of Mental talk-therapy.
Illness: Why?,' June 23, 2011; and 'The
Illusions of Psychiatry,' July 14,
2011. See also David Healy, The
Antidepressant Era (Harvard University
Press, 1999) and Let Them Eat Prozac:
The Unhealthy Relationship Between the
Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression
(NYU Press, 2004).
In this review, Appignanesi makes an <A HREF="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/11/09/return-of-the-freud-wars/">[ref]</A>
accusation that Crews got some facts
wrong:
Crews responds in a letter later
"Nor is it accurate for Crews to published in the NYRB, November 9, 2017:
claim that Freud had almost no
patients in his early years on "... My assertion, however, was
whom to base his insights, or that quite different and more damning:
he routinely misdiagnosed. His that in the later 1890s, when he
patient record book from 1896 to was already calling himself a
1899 is held by the Library of psychoanalyst, Freud had trouble
Congress. Freud saw about sixty convincing, successfully treating,
patients a year for over five or even retaining the clients who
hundred visits." did cross his threshold."
"In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud
confessed that his patients in that
period had greeted his demands for
repressed infantile memories with
'disbelief and laughter' ... Many of
them, regarding him as a crank and a
bully, had simply walked out on him."
Crews then quotes a half-dozen remarks
from letters to Fliess from the 1890s,
complaining that he couldn't complete a
single case of treatment, and that his
consulting room was empty.
Appignanesi responded:
" ... only someone deaf to irony and
humor would so often misunderstand
Freud's self-deprecating wit."
Um. He was
just kidding?
Yow.
Crews (2017) concludes:
"This was the Freud who was already
telling readers, as he would do again
and again for decades thereafter, that
psychoanalytic theory had been
validated by dazzling and unparalleled
therapeutic success. ..."
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