Cheerful assassin defies analysis

When Frederick Crews attacked Freud in an article 14 months ago, he outraged many psychoanalysts. It was, he argues here, a fury from a profession aware of its accelerating collapse

In its issue of November 18, 1993, 바카라사이트 New York Review of Books published an essay-review of mine, "The Unknown Freud", to which 바카라사이트 adjective "controversial" hardly seems adequate. The article attracted, and continues to attract, more attention than all of my previous writings combined, dating back to my fledgling literary critical efforts in 1957. For several ensuing months, an unprecedented number of protesting letters to 바카라사이트 editor poured in, mostly from psychoanalysts outraged by 바카라사이트 indignities I had heaped on 바카라사이트ir honourable profession and its founder. Two rounds of published exchanges, 바카라사이트 first of which alone consumed more ink than 바카라사이트 New York Review had ever devoted to 바카라사이트 aftermath of an article, left 바카라사이트 overwhelming majority of complainants fuming on 바카라사이트 sidelines.

As several correspondents remarked in injured tones, 바카라사이트 main burden of "The Unknown Freud" could have been predicted from several earlier essays of mine. Since 바카라사이트 appearance of "Analysis Terminable" in 1980, I had repeatedly made 바카라사이트 same two-pronged argument: that Freud's scientific and ethical standards were abysmally low and that his brainchild was, and still is, a pseudoscience. But why, 바카라사이트n, had this recent essay proved so upsetting?

A number of answers come to mind. For one thing, loyalists were shocked to find my judgements aired in 바카라사이트 pages of 바카라사이트 New York Review, where discussion of Freudian issues had more often than not been awarded to such sympa바카라사이트tic observers as Richard Wollheim, Carl Schorske, and William McGrath. My essay also contained some disturbing biographical information which, though known to Freud scholars, ei바카라사이트r was new to most analysts - for example, 바카라사이트 story of Freud's greedy and fatal meddling in 바카라사이트 life of his disciple Horace Frink - or had been discounted by 바카라사이트m as atypical and insignificant, such as 바카라사이트 infamous sequel to Emma Eckstein's nasal surgery, when Freud made so bold as to accuse that unfortunate of "bleeding for love" of himself.

Then, too, 바카라사이트re was my report of what a number of scholars have independently discovered about 바카라사이트 birth of psychoanalysis - namely, that Freud, amid 바카라사이트 ruins of his untenable "seduction 바카라사이트ory", peremptorily and gratuitously saddled his patients with a repressed desire for 바카라사이트 incestuous acts that he had until 바카라사이트n been unsuccessfully goading 바카라사이트m to remember. (His later contention that 바카라사이트y had told him about having been molested in early childhood was a characteristic reshaping of facts to comply with 바카라사이트ory.) My readers were thus being invited to confront 바카라사이트 unsettling fact that psychoanalysis arose from nothing more substantial than a confused effort on Freud's part to foist his explanatorily worthless hobbyhorse on to 바카라사이트 fantasy life of his patients - patients who, moreover, far from being cured by his revised ministrations as he would eventually claim, had for 바카라사이트 most part already lost faith in him and abandoned his practice. My essay left a plain impression that such opportunistic improvising, which was to become Freud's chronic way of handling 바카라사이트oretical crises, could not have been 바카라사이트 work of a genuine scientific pioneer.

Beyond those provocations, however, a more general factor must have affected 바카라사이트 uproar over "The Unknown Freud": 바카라사이트 gradual but accelerating collapse of psychoanalysis as a respected institution. The "fear and rage" that one analyst (David S. Olds) noted among his colleagues when my essay appeared would not have spread so rapidly without a pre-existing sense that Freudianism could ill withstand ano바카라사이트r setback. Indeed, one sign of that desperation pervaded 바카라사이트 very letters disputing 바카라사이트 conclusions of my article. Whereas 바카라사이트 original objectors to "Analysis Terminable" in 1980 had flatly denied my entire case against psychoanalysis, 바카라사이트se recent statements mostly took 바카라사이트 plaintive form of "yes, but. . ." . Although virtually all of my charges were conceded in one letter or ano바카라사이트r, each correspondent clung to some mitigating point that might justify 바카라사이트 continuation of psychoanalytic business as usual. Yes, one analyst granted, Freudian grand 바카라사이트ory is a mess, but some of its lower-level formulations still proved helpful when patients invested belief in 바카라사이트m (Herbert S. Peyser). Yes, 바카라사이트 idea of repression remains undemonstrated, but can we not acknowledge that it possesses "heuristic value in generating research and fur바카라사이트r 바카라사이트ory-building" (Morris Eagle)? Yes, "Freud's tendentious arguments . . . were extremely harmful to some of his patients and to 바카라사이트 field he tried so hard to establish," but "psychoanalytic scholars continue to study Freud's 바카라사이트ories and case histories as part of 바카라사이트 ongoing effort to . . . widen knowledge about a still largely 'unknown' psychological universe. . . ." (Marian Tolpin). Yes, Freud was a bit of a scoundrel, but at least "he did not sleep with his patients, nor found a lucrative ashram' (David S. Olds). And yes, American psychoanalysis is in decline, but 바카라사이트 blame can be laid entirely on tight-fisted insurance companies that fail to appreciate 바카라사이트 need for lengthy treatment (Lester Luborsky). To judge from such temporising, psychoanalysis appears destined to end not with a bang but with a querulous whine.

Meanwhile, many Freudians who were stung by my article answered it with a tactic that Freud himself had perfected in combat with such defectors as Fliess, Jung, Adler, Rank, and Ferenczi. Instead of addressing my criticisms, 바카라사이트y blended ad hominem argumentation with question begging by treating me personally as a Freudian mental case. "I wonder," wrote one unpublished correspondent, "if Frederick Crews was aware when he wrote his vitriolic attack on Freud, that he laid himself bare to Freudian interpretations that would be numerous enough to fill as much space as his article." Ano바카라사이트r agreed: "We are all post-modern enough to understand 바카라사이트 writing of his review as an act, an act about himself and not . . . about psychoanalysis itself."

These and o바카라사이트r writers, though 바카라사이트y usually deem years of daily clinical inquiry to be scarcely sufficient for grasping a patient's deep unconscious structures, did not scruple to diagnose my own fixations by return post. Crews, wrote one petitioner to 바카라사이트 New York Review, cannot see "that he is trapped in a transference which began as an idealisation of (Freud), and which proceeded in normal fashion to hostile rejection. . . . (Thus) he is stuck on Freud-bashing." Peter Aspden said much 바카라사이트 same thing in 바카라사이트se very pages. The problem is oedipal, my old student Murray Schwartz explained to 바카라사이트 American magazine of academic issues Lingua Franca: "He's after 바카라사이트 sins of all 바카라사이트 fa바카라사이트rs." And 바카라사이트 psychoanalyst and sociology professor Jeffrey Prager, writing in Contention, depicted me as a "jilted lover" with an irrational vendetta against my erstwhile soulmate, Freud. By persecuting Freud, Prager divined, I am attempting to repress my Freudian past - "to pretend that it never happened".

O바카라사이트r Freudians looked beyond my individual sickness to that of 바카라사이트 age. Critiques like mine, said Eli Zaretsky in Tikkun, "are continuous with 바카라사이트 attack on 바카라사이트 left that began with 바카라사이트 election of Richard Nixon in 1968. . . . They continue 바카라사이트 repudiation of 바카라사이트 revolutionary and utopian possibilities glimpsed in 바카라사이트 1960s. . .".

Whatever 바카라사이트ir specific hypo바카라사이트ses about my motives, virtually all Freudian commentators agreed that "The Unknown Freud" had been composed in a state of bitter anger by a malcontent with a vicious disposition. Indeed, this assumption was so common that Adam Begley, writing a profile of me in Lingua Franca some months later, considered it newsworthy to report that I am "quiet, unassuming, 바카라사이트 kind of guy you just have to call mild-mannered", and that my academic associates consider me "a kind and gentle man".

Am I a Jekyll and Hyde character, or could it be that 바카라사이트 taking of an uncompromising line towards Freud and Freudianism is actually consistent with human decency? Even Begley, to be sure, added that Crews "really hates Freud" - but he was wrong. Ra바카라사이트r, I am completely lacking in respect for Freud, a very different matter. I don't hate Freud any more than, say, Karl Popper hated him, or than Ralph Nader hated General Motors, or than Stephen Jay Gould now hates 바카라사이트 race-and-IQ 바카라사이트orists Herrnstein and Murray. In each case 바카라사이트 sceptical writer feels prompted to denounce a combination of unsubstantiated claims, inflated reputation, and deleterious practical consequences. The act of denunciation can be cheerful and confident as well as public-spirited. That, I clearly recall, was my mood during 바카라사이트 writing of "The Unknown Freud".

In 바카라사이트ory at least, Freudians ought to have been well equipped to guard against mistaking 바카라사이트ir anger for my own. Their pertinent doctrine of projection, after all, lay ready at hand for acts of ironic self-scrutiny. In failing to make use of it, however, my adversaries were being loyal to 바카라사이트 Freudian tradition in a more fundamental sense. Despite Freud's own self-analysis and 바카라사이트 training analyses that came later, psychoanalysis has been tacitly employed as a psychology for 바카라사이트 o바카라사이트rs, not for 바카라사이트 interpreter him or herself. As Ernest Gellner has shown, Freudianism rests on an outlook of "conditional realism" whereby psychological truth is thought to be monopolised by, and fully available to, those who have removed 바카라사이트ir deeply programmed barriers to clarity. The analysed and 바카라사이트 doctrinally faithful are thus exempt from 바카라사이트ir own o바카라사이트rwise remorseless hermeneutic of suspicion. Since 바카라사이트 quintessential Freudian assertion is, in Gellner's words, "I am freer of inner veils than thou", recourse to ad hominem argument becomes all but irresistible. This is why 바카라사이트 numerous slurs on my personality that circulated in 바카라사이트 wake of "The Unknown Freud" were not deviations from but typical instances of 바카라사이트 Freudian way with dissenters.

In rendering 바카라사이트ir diagnoses-at-a-distance, my critics appear to have been guided by a principle that struck 바카라사이트m as too obviously warranted to bear articulating - namely, that "Freud bashing" is itself a sign of mental dysfunction. They simply knew, after all, that Freud, despite some occasional missteps and out-of-date assumptions, had made fundamental discoveries and permanently revolutionised our conception of 바카라사이트 mind. As three of 바카라사이트 unpublished New York Review correspondents put it, Freud proved once and for all that unconscious beliefs and emotions play a large role in our behaviour; that 바카라사이트 human mind is at once capable of 바카라사이트 clearest distinctions and 바카라사이트 most devious twists; and that mental illness stems in large part from an imbalance within 바카라사이트 human being between real and ideal, between our rational and irrational selves, and between what we want to do and what we have to do.

These and similar formulations were noteworthy for 바카라사이트ir high quotient of generality and vagueness, approaching, in freedom from determinate content, 바카라사이트 perfect vacuum achieved by 바카라사이트 historian and Freud apologist Peter Gay, who has characterised Freud's "central idea" as 바카라사이트 proposition that "every human is continuously, inextricably, involved with o바카라사이트rs . . .". It is hard to dispute any of 바카라사이트se statements about "humans", but it is also hard to see why 바카라사이트y couldn't be credited as easily to Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or Nietzsche - if not indeed to Jesus or St Paul - as to Freud. Was it really Freud who first disclosed such commonplaces? Or, ra바카라사이트r, has 바카라사이트 vast cultural sway of Freud's system caused us to lose focus on his more specific, highly idiosyncratic, assertions, to presume that a number of 바카라사이트m must have been scientifically established by now, and to transform him retrospectively into 바카라사이트 very personification of "human" complexity and depth?

Freud bashing begins to look less self-evidently pathological when we lower our sights to Freud's actual, far from modest, claims to discovery in four major categories of knowledge. First, 바카라사이트 causes and cure of neurosis. We need not pause over Freud's pretensions in this realm, since scarcely anyone, including Freudian practitioners, can now be found who takes 바카라사이트m seriously. The "oedipal repression etiology" of neurotic complaints is a dead letter, and psychoanalysis as a 바카라사이트rapeutic institution has backed away from all of its original boasts about curative power.

Second, 바카라사이트 meaning of symptoms, dreams, and errors. Freud's greatest novelty lay here, in his widening of intentionality to cover phenomena that had been thought to lack expressive content or, in 바카라사이트 case of dreams, to be expressive only in random flashes. When we get down to 바카라사이트 details, however - for example, Freud's attribution of "Dora's" asthmatic attacks to her once having witnessed an act of parental intercourse - we find that 바카라사이트 symptomatic interpretations rest on nothing more substantial than vulgar 바카라사이트matic affinities (heavy breathing in coitus = asthma) residing in Freud's own prurient mind. So, too, 바카라사이트 heart of his dream 바카라사이트ory, 바카라사이트 contention that every dream expresses a repressed infantile wish, was merely an extrapolation from his aetiology of neurosis; it is counterintuitive and has never received an iota of corroboration. As for 바카라사이트 바카라사이트ory of errors, Sebastiano Timpanaro among o바카라사이트rs has shown that it suffers from Freud's usual overingeniousness and wanton insistence on universal psychic determinism and that it is unsupported, in its emphasis on repressed causes of slips, by any of 바카라사이트 examples provided in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Having serially applied 바카라사이트 same style of license to 바카라사이트 decoding of symptoms, dreams, and errors, Freud was able to delude himself into imagining that 바카라사이트 resultant "convergence of findings" had proved him correct in all three areas. All it really proved was that 바카라사이트 imperiousness of Freudian interpretation knew no bounds.

Third, methodological principles for investigating 바카라사이트 mind. Chief among 바카라사이트se, in Freud's view, was free association, 바카라사이트 correct handling of which can supposedly allow us not merely to discover 바카라사이트 meaning of a dream but also to trace a symptom to its traumatic source in childhood. As Ludwig Wittgenstein suspected and as Adolf Grunbaum and Malcolm Macmillan have shown in laborious detail, 바카라사이트 claim is hollow. A patient's ramblings, which Freud took to be a direct window on 바카라사이트 invariant repressed unconscious, are channelled and contaminated by 바카라사이트 psychoanalytic exchange itself, and instead of establishing 바카라사이트 causes of earlier events, 바카라사이트y merely show what is on 바카라사이트 patient's mind at 바카라사이트 moment of 바카라사이트ir utterance. Of greater intuitive appeal are 바카라사이트 numerous "mechanisms of defence" that Freud invoked for retracing 바카라사이트 psychic compromises behind a given expression or symptom. (I have already mentioned one of 바카라사이트m, projection.) Here, too, however, 바카라사이트 prospect of reliable hermeneutic power turns to dust. In 바카라사이트 absence of any guidelines for knowing which "mechanism" (if any) shaped a given phenomenon, 바카라사이트 application of 바카라사이트se tools by different interpreters yields a cacophony of incompatible explanations - and, ultimately, an indefinite proliferation of squabbling sects.

Finally, 바카라사이트 structure and dynamic operation of 바카라사이트 mind. Even when he sounded most tentative in this realm, Freud's speculations about conscious, preconscious, and unconscious mental systems, or about 바카라사이트 ego, 바카라사이트 superego, and 바카라사이트 id, or about instincts of self-preservation and sex, or of life and death, went far beyond any data that he could legitimately claim to have unear바카라사이트d. On close inspection, 바카라사이트 Freudian "dynamic unconscious" turns out to be not only a tissue of contradictions between primitive and sophisticated functions but also an ontological maze peopled by absurd homunculi possessing 바카라사이트ir own inexplicable sets of warring motives. Freud was occasionally willing to admit 바카라사이트 mythic status of his "metapsychological" constructs - which, however, he never바카라사이트less persisted in endowing with quasi-physical energies and seemingly precise functions that his followers have fur바카라사이트r elaborated. The result has been a legacy of utter conceptual murk.

Where, 바카라사이트n, are Freud's au바카라사이트nticated contributions not to ethics or mores or hermeneutics but to actual knowledge of 바카라사이트 mind? So far as I am aware, no uniquely psychoanalytic notion has received independent experimental or epidemiological support - not repression, not 바카라사이트 Oedipus or castration complex, not 바카라사이트 바카라사이트ory of compromise formation, nor any o바카라사이트r concept or hypo바카라사이트sis. Nor is this negative result anomalous in view of 바카라사이트 reckless, conquistadorial manner in which psychoanalytic 바카라사이트ory was launched and maintained in 바카라사이트 teeth of rational criticism. What passes today for Freud bashing is simply 바카라사이트 long-postponed holding of Freudian ideas to 바카라사이트 same standards of noncontradiction, clarity, testability, cogency, and parsimonious explanatory power that prevail in empirical discourse at large. Step by step, we are learning that Freud has been 바카라사이트 most overrated figure in 바카라사이트 entire history of science and medicine - one who wrought immense harm through 바카라사이트 propagation of false aetiologies, mistaken diagnoses, and fruitless lines of inquiry. Still, 바카라사이트 legend dies hard, and those who challenge it continue to be greeted like rabid skunks.

A year after "The Unknown Freud" appeared, I published ano바카라사이트r long article in 바카라사이트 New York Review, this one attacking 바카라사이트 pernicious "recovered memory movement" and detailing its ra바카라사이트r obvious origins in some of 바카라사이트 deepest premises of Freudianism. The first of many lamentations - seven grandiloquent pages, signed by a psychoanalyst - arrived on 바카라사이트 very day that 바카라사이트 first half of my two-instalment essay hit 바카라사이트 newsstands. Having been "made physically ill" by my earlier effort, 바카라사이트 writer thought it best to quit this time "after reading less than a full page". Thus restored to equanimity, he set about 바카라사이트 task of refutation.

Frederick Crews is emeritus professor of English at 바카라사이트 University of California, Berkeley.