Is there anything good about Freud’s legacy? about:reader?url=https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/08/3...

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Is there anything good about Freud’s legacy?

8-10 minutes

Lately I’ve been talking about Fred Crews’s new 600-page critique of
Freud, Freud: The Making of an Illusion, and you can find my take (postive) here.
The book, in concert with Crews’s earlier work, and many other critics, pretty
much demolishes not only the scientific pretensions of psychoanalysis, once
Freud’s big gift to the world, but also the man himself, who is revealed, as he is
increasingly being shown, as pretty much of a charlatan. Not just an incompetent,
but someone who actually realized that he was making up stuff and consciously
lying, but doing so because he had a desperate drive to be famous.

If psychoanalysis is on the way out, as it is, and Freud is pretty much known to
have made up a lot of the clinical stuff he wrote, including his supposed “cures”
(which weren’t), then what remains of the man? His theories of hysteria and
neurosis, of the Oedipus complex and repression of early trauma, have been
debunked. Even his view that we’re driven by unconscious factors was not original
with him, and assumes a completely different meaning now that neuroscience is on
the scene.

In a new piece in the New Yorker, which doubles as a review of Crews’s book and a
chronicle of Freudianism’s downfall, staff writer Louis Menand tries desperately to
find some good bits of Freud’s legacy. His article, “Why Freud survives” (subtitle,
“He’s been debunked again and again—and yet we still can’t give him up”),
unfortunately fails to redeem Freud’s legacy even a little bit.

By and large, Menand agrees with Crews’s conclusions: that Freud was a man
corrupted by ambition, and who devised a watertight, non-refutable theory of
human behavior that, in the end, led to a practice that was no better than placebo,
drugs, or other talk therapy. Menand’s main criticism of Crews’s book is that
it’s too critical:

That year [1998], in an interview with a Canadian philosophy professor, Todd

Dufresne, Crews was asked whether he was ready to call it a day with Freud.
“Absolutely,” he said. “After almost twenty years of explaining and illustrating the

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same basic critique, I will just refer interested parties to ‘Skeptical Engagements,’
‘The Memory Wars,’ and ‘Unauthorized Freud.’ Anyone who is unmoved by my
reasoning there isn’t going to be touched by anything further I might say.” He
spoke too soon.

Crews seems to have grown worried that although Freud and Freudianism may
look dead, we cannot be completely, utterly, a hundred per cent sure. Freud might
be like the Commendatore in “Don Giovanni”: he gets killed in the first act and
then shows up for dinner at the end, the Stone Guest. So Crews spent eleven years
writing “Freud: The Making of an Illusion” (Metropolitan), just out—a six-
hundred-and-sixty-page stake driven into its subject’s cold, cold heart.

The new book synthesizes fifty years of revisionist scholarship, repeating and
amplifying the findings of other researchers (fully acknowledged), and tacking on
a few additional charges. Crews is an attractively uncluttered stylist, and he has an
amazing story to tell, but his criticism of Freud is relentless to the point of
monomania. He evidently regards “balance” as a pass given to chicanery, and even
readers sympathetic to the argument may find it hard to get all the way through
the book. It ought to come with a bulb of garlic.

Well, unrelenting revelatons of Freud’s unsavory character and work isn’t by itself
a criticism, for Freud may have been a pretty dubious character and his work
largely bogus. That is in fact the take I get from what I’ve read about Freud
(including his own works: The Interpretation of Dreams is, to a scientist, a long
and torturous exercise in confirmation bias). So why strive for a nonexistent
“balance” if there isn’t one? Menand also psychoanalyzes Crews’s speculation that
Freud had an illicit affair with his sister-in-law Minna Bernays (not a trivial matter
for a psychoanalyst who boasted that he never did anything like that, and indeed,
there’s some evidence for this affair) by saying “A Freudian would suspect that
there is something going on here.” He’s referring to Crews’s discussion, and this is
simply an ad hominem remark, a way to diminish Crews’s criticisms by saying that
they’re coming from his previous infatuation with Freud and subsequent
disappointment. But scholarship is scholarship, and Menand can’t find a chink in
Crews’s armor here.

Well, Menand tries to find some “balance”. But he comes up with only two good
things to say about Freud’s legacy—even after admitting, with Crews, that “Freud
was a lousy scientist.” Menand mentions talk therapy, but adds that
psychoanalysis is no better than placebo and that there are other talk therapies,
with no evidence that psychoanalysis is superior to others. (Indeed, cognitive

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behavioral therapy seems to work better for many issues, and true psychoanalysis
demands that the patient give up years of time and many dollars.). But there’s also
the unconscious:

People also find appealing the idea that they have motives and desires they are
unaware of. That kind of “depth” psychology was popularized by Freudianism, and
it isn’t likely to go away. It can be useful to be made to realize that your feelings
about people you love are actually ambivalent, or that you were being aggressive
when you thought you were only being extremely polite. Of course, you shouldn’t
have to work your way through your castration anxiety to get there.

Exactly. This contribution is pretty much independent of the whole complicated

armamentarium of psychoanalysis. So if you want to say that Freud’s legacy was,
along with others, to make us aware that we’re not 100% conscious of why we do
what we do, then let him have that. But realize, too, that neuroscience, combined
with materialism, offers an even deeper explanation.

And then there’s this special pleading for Freud (my emphasis):

As Crews is right to believe, this Freud has long outlived psychoanalysis. For many
years, even as writers were discarding the more patently absurd elements of his
theory—penis envy, or the death drive—they continued to pay homage to Freud’s
unblinking insight into the human condition. That persona helped Freud to
evolve, in the popular imagination, from a scientist into a kind of poet
of the mind. And the thing about poets is that they cannot be refuted.
No one asks of “Paradise Lost”: But is it true? Freud and his concepts, now
converted into metaphors, joined the legion of the undead.

Sadly, what “unblinking insights” that Freud offers into the human condition
aren’t mentioned by Menand. But if Freud is turned into a “poet of the mind”, one
whose insights “cannot be refuted”, then how can he give us any insight into the
human condition? For surely if those insights are true, they must be shown to be
true by rationality, repeatable observations, testing, and experimentation, not by
poetry. And they must be capable of being refuted! Here we have the New Yorker‘s
frequent claim that there are “ways of knowing beyond science.” Yes, insofar as
poets appeal to our personal love of language, and make us think about ourselves
and our lives, they can’t be refuted, for they’re offering a personal and subjective
experience. But they can be refuted if, it’s claimed, they tell us something about
human behavior. Why doesn’t Menand see this?

Finally, Menand ends with another watery encomium towards Freud (my

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emphasis):

Crews’s idea that Freud’s target was Christianity appears to be a late fruit of his old
undergraduate fascination with Nietzsche. Crews apparently once saw Freud as a
Nietzschean critic of life-denying moralism, a heroic Antichrist dedicated to
liberating human beings from subservience to idols they themselves created. Is his
current renunciation a renunciation of his own radical youth? Is his castigation of
Freud really a form of self-castigation? We don’t need to go there. But since
humanity is not liberated from its illusions yet, if that’s what Freud
was really all about, he is still undead.

Okay, so Freud helped liberate us from our illusions—and I’ll credit him with a
clearsighted atheism. But what other illusions? What insights did he offer?
Menand doesn’t say. Freud’s still undead the way other miscreants are undead:
their bad ideas are still around. You can find them in many college humanities
departments.

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