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 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 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 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.
