Thursday, April 30, 2020

If Freud is dead, why do psychologists keep attacking him?


If Freud Is Dead, Why Do Psychologists Keep Attacking him?

            Attacks by research-oriented psychologists on psychoanalytic theory have been common in the last fifty years (e.g., Eysenck, 1985). Time declared that Freud was “dead” in 1993 (Gray, 1993). A recent book proposing that psychiatric disorders could be seen as rational choices opened with an attack on the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious (Rofe, 2000) and cited numerous articles and reviews indicating that psychoanalytic ideas were incorrect (e.g., Holmes, 1990).

            Why are psychologists not convinced after all these years that psychoanalytic theory is correct? There is no guerrilla movement by psychoanalysts trying to convince us that the theory is valid. Almost of the papers in the psychoanalytic journals are clinical in nature and are read primarily by psychoanalytic clinicians.

            Is it possible that the attacks on psychoanalytic theory continue, backed up by research failing to produce evidence for the validity of the theory, are a result of reaction formation? The theories of psychologists reject or ignore psychoanalytic ideas, yet the psychologists themselves know either consciously or unconsciously that many of the psychoanalytic constructs and processes are true. We know from our own experience that psychoanalytic theory is valid. For example, Rofe would replace the concept of the unconscious with the concepts of divided attention, absent-mindedness, distraction and normal forgetting. But my personal experience as an adult of realizing that I was angry at my parents, a realization that resulted in the lifting of chronic depression, fits the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious far better that Rofe’s concept of distraction. I wasn’t unaware of my anger because I was distracted or absent-minded. The anger was unconscious!

            If one raises children, one can witness psychoanalytic processes such as introjection, the Oedipal conflict, repression and reaction formation in operation. Indeed, I used personal examples to illustrate these processes in a textbook I wrote on theories of personality (Lester, 1995).

            A behavior therapist once told me of being asked to treat a woman with chronic hiccups. He found out that she was anxious about being pregnant, having had sexual intercourse for the first time. He arranged for a pregnancy test which was negative, and the hiccups stopped. He was annoyed because he knew that the symptom made sense from a psychoanalytic perspective, and yet he was a behavior therapist and did not “believe in” psychoanalysis.[1]

            I asked a literature professor who had published analyses of characters from Greek plays and from Shakespeare (Faber, 1970) why he chose to interpret literary characters from a psychoanalytic perspective rather than from other perspectives. He said that, using a psychoanalytic perspective, he almost always found something to say about the characters and their motivations. Other perspectives would have little to say in most of these situations.

            Psychoanalytic theory has the broadest application of any psychological theory, suggesting hypotheses for situations for which other theories would have no applicability; and it is consistent with our experience in many cases. Research may often fail to confirm predictions derived from the theory, but perhaps we should trust our experience more than research findings.

References

Eysenck, H. J. Decline and fall of the Freudian empire. New York: Viking, 1985.
Faber, M. D. Suicide and Greek tragedy. New York: Sphinx, 1970.
Gray, P. The assault on Freud. Time, 1993, 142(November 29), 46-51.
Holmes, D. S. The evidence for repression. In J. L. Singer (Ed.) Repression and dissociation, pp. 85-102. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990.
Lester, D. Theories of personality. Washington, DC: Taylor & Francis, 1995.
Rofe, Y. The rationality of psychological disorders. Boston: Kluwer, 2000.



[1]  A woman whom I knew was pregnant and began losing things, such as gloves and umbrellas, a most unusual occurrence for her – again a symptom that is easily understandable from a psychoanalytic perspective. She eventually did have an abortion.

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