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Unconscious Deeps and Empirical Shallows
Panel presentation at the symposium "Whose Freud? The Place of
Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture," Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University,
April 3, 1998 1
Frederick Crews
[Note: This paper has been revised to reflect the experience of the symposium itself.
No words have been changed, but added passages, all of which can be found in the endnotes,
are indicated by brackets.]
To the question posed in our conference title, "Whose Freud?", I can offer a
simple reply: he's all yours. Take my Freud-please! But do you really want him-the
fanatical, self-inflated, ruthless, myopic, yet intricately devious Freud who has been
unearthed by the independent scholarship of the past generation-or would you prefer the
Freud of self-created legend, whose name can still conjure the illusion that
"psychoanalytic truth" is authenticated by the sheer genius of its discoverer?
Let me put this issue concretely by reminding you of the evocative passage in Freud's
History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement in which he describes the hostility of his
Viennese colleagues when he first lectured them on May 2, 1896, about "the part
played by sexuality in the aetiology of the neuroses." Who among us hasn't been moved
by the story of Freud's sudden realization on that day that he was "one of those who
had 'disturbed the sleep of the world'"? It dawned on him, he recalls, that he would
never be able to expect "objectivity and tolerance" from straw authorities who
lacked his own "moral courage"; thenceforth he would have to pursue the hard
path of scientific discovery in "splendid isolation." 2
That persecuted but dauntless figure is the Promethean hero commended to us not only by
Freud himself but also by the house mythographer of psychoanalysis, Ernest Jones, and by
subsequent partisans to this day. And it is just the Freud whose borrowed glory can
improve the likelihood that one's own broadly psychoanalytic speculations will be deemed
valiant and canny rather than, say, politically and academically conformist. If, however,
we approach Freud not as our great forebear and patron but as a historical agent like any
other, we cannot avoid noticing that the thesis he proposed to that doubting audience in
1896 was the very "seduction theory" that he would privately repudiate sixteen
months later. Privately but not publicly, for in that case he would have had to own up not
only to his mistake about the causation of hysteria but also to the nonexistence of his
boasted cures and, still more damagingly, to the unreliability of both the investigative
method and the psychodynamic premises that he would continue to employ for the remainder
of his career.
Mental inertia and a reluctance to admit error may help to explain why academic humanists
give no heed to such deflationary facts. 3 But by shielding
Freud's "insight" from normal skepticism, they also grant themselves the luxury
of playing the knowledge game with the net down. The most fundamental rule of that game is
that a given theory or hypothesis cannot be validated by invoking "evidence"
manufactured by that same supposition. 4 The question-begging
traits of psychoanalysis-the treatment of tendentious interpretations as raw data; the
reflex negation of appearances in favor of reduction to the selfish, the sexual, and the
infantile; the ample menus of symbolic meanings and "defense mechanisms" upon
which the interpreter can draw to adorn prearranged conclusions; the ever handy wild cards
of "the unconscious" and "overdetermination"-all of these constitute a
scandal for anyone who subscribes to community standards of rational and empirical
inquiry. Yet the very liberties that mark Freudianism as a pseudoscience render it
irresistibly charming to humanists in search of instant "depth." (I ought to
know; I used to be one of them!) And if, emulating Freud's tactic of pathologizing his
critics, Freudian humanists can brand dissenters as suffering from resistance, repression,
and denial-in short, from the obsessive-compulsive disorder of "Freud
bashing"-then their hermeneutic freedom would appear to be absolute.
Of course, academic Freudians would prefer not to think of themselves as having resigned
from the wider intellectual enterprise. More typically, they invoke psychoanalytic notions
to address cultural and historical problems and then infer from the very ingenuity of
their handiwork, just as Freud did, that the doctrine has thereby proved its fruitfulness.
5 Or, if they have an activist bent, they recast Freudianism
to purge it of its patriarchal and conservative implications and then "discover"
psychoanalytically that society needs to be realigned in accordance with their ideology. 6
A bright high school senior could easily detect the fallaciousness of such maneuvers.
Unfortunately, however, a bright graduate student in literature, imbued with what now
passes for theoretical sophistication, would find nothing to complain about. Such is the
intellectually corrupting effect of a self-validating and parochial system of thought. But
it is not the antiquated doctrine per se that deserves reproach; the fault lies with
professors who not only refrain from teaching standards of empirical adequacy but actively
or implicitly denigrate them.
As the first scheduled panelist in this conference and, I gather, the only one who shares
the wholly negative view of psychoanalytic theory that is now all but consensual in
American psychology departments, I am poorly situated to rebut the more sanguine judgments
that will be voiced by others. But at least I can ask uncommitted members of this audience
to keep some questions in mind. I will close by briefly commenting on three lines of
argument that cannot fail to be broached before our adjournment tomorrow. 7
1. You will be told that evidence-based objections to Freudianism are beside the point,
since psychoanalysis isn't a body of propositions but merely a subtle dialogue that weaves
a fictive story, thus honoring the sheer ambiguity of experience while enhancing
self-awareness of an ineffable but precious kind. This would have come as a surprise to
the author of the Oedipus and castration complexes, the ego, id, and superego, penis envy,
the vaginal orgasm, the death instinct, the primal scene and the primal crime, and on and
on. Psychoanalysis does traffic in subtly guided and indoctrinating dialogue, but its
theory has been, and remains, largely a causal account of mental functioning and
development. As such, it cannot dodge the criteria of assessment that apply to every such
theory. And, of course, it doesn't begin to satisfy those criteria; hence the retreat of
latter-day Freudians into the absurd pretense of nonpropositionality.
2. Subsequent panelists will assure you that while Freud made some mistakes, modern
psychoanalysis has long since corrected them. When you hear this, please raise your hand
and ask which of the ever-proliferating schools of analysis the speaker has in mind and
why those schools cannot agree on a single point of doctrine or interpretation. The answer
is that the epistemic circularity of Freud's tradition, guaranteeing abundant
"confirmation" of every proposed idea, has not been remedied in any degree.
Analysts of every stripe still adhere to Freud's illusion that reliable knowledge of a
patient's repressed complexes can be gleaned from studying free associations and the
transference-even though such study is well known to produce only those revelations
favored by the therapist's sect or local institute. 8
3. You will doubtless hear that objections to psychoanalytic theory stem from a shallow
and outmoded positivism that insists on impossible standards of proof. Wrong again. No
philosophy of science, positivist or antipositivist, is entailed in the elementary demand
that a theory refrain from justifying itself by appeal to its own contested postulates.
That is just everyday rational sense, intuitively grasped by fair-minded researchers in
every field though not by the pundits of postmodernism.
It is precisely because such rationality continues to be exercised with vigor that Freud's
ideas, as Edward Shorter observes in his recent History of Psychiatry, "are now
vanishing like the last snows of winter." 9 How ironic it
is that well-traveled academics, like bunkered troops on a remote island who haven't heard
that the war is over, should be the last to get the news! And now that the point is
finally sinking in, how sad it is-and how symptomatic of all that is feeble and
dismissible about the humanities today-that humanists can look upon the collapse of a
would-be science within its proper domain as a fine opportunity to turn that same doctrine
to their own hermeneutic ends!
NOTES
1 [The panelists and session chairs were, in order of presentation, Peter
Brooks, Frederick Crews, Robert Michels, Judith Butler, Juliet Mitchell, Esther da Costa
Meyer, Toril Moi, Hubert Damisch, Peter Lowenberg, Mary Jacobus, Katherine Kearns, Paul
Robinson, Kaja Silverman, Leo Bersani, Kevis Goodman, Dominick LaCapra, Eric Santner,
Meredith Skura, Robert J. Lifton, Elise Snyder, Morton Reiser, David Forrest, Robert
Shulman, Arnold Cooper, Peter Gay, Richard Wollheim, Jonathan Lear, Donald Davidson, and
John Forrester.]
2 Standard Edition, 14: 21-22.
3 [As if to illustrate this point, our conference members overlooked it,
making confident occasional reference to the great breakthrough of Freud's etiological
shift from sexual abuse to oedipal fantasy.]
4 [No one who spoke at our symposium, from either the podium or the floor,
conceded this basic point. When it was mentioned at all, it was dismissed as naive; and it
was repeatedly flouted in our panel presentations, most of which took for granted Freud's
maxim that "applications of analysis are always confirmations of it as well"
(SE, 22: 146). Richard Wollheim finally declared that my point had been immediately
"refuted" by Robert Michels; but Wollheim proved unable even to state it
correctly. According to him, what I had said was that ideas derived from a theory's
postulates cannot be tested at all.
Only in Wollheim's presentation was any attempt made to address the problem of validation;
other speakers evidently considered psychoanalytic propositions (their favorite ones,
anyway) too self-evidently justified to require defending. Wollheim began by criticizing
those Freudians who hold back from strong truth claims; in his view, it is quite possible
to demonstrate the cogency of theoretical tenets within a clinical context. As an example,
he cited the recalcitrant behavior of a training analyst's patient-behavior that the
analyst's colleagues successfully traced to the patient's early relations with her mother.
For Wollheim, the emergence of that interpretation from careful discussion vouched for its
plausibility; and since, in this case, "a small piece of psychoanalytic thinking
helps us to comprehend the situation," the theory behind that thinking has received
strong support.
To evaluate this claim, we must first sort out the point being supported from the evidence
that favors it. (We are on our own here, as Wollheim provided no further enlightenment.)
In Wollheim's eyes, I gather, the group of analytic discussants had succeeded in locating
the source of the patient's present conduct in her early relations with her mother; this
success then validated the Freudian idea that noncooperation with an analyst is always
transferential, i.e., rooted in a childhood attitude that is being reenacted in the
consulting room. Obviously, however, the "evidence" here is itself a Freudian
interpretation, and one that preempts a more plausible explanation that never occurs to
psychoanalysts: that the patient was reacting negatively to here-and-now irritants
supplied by the therapist. The theory of transference regularly acts to exculpate
therapists in just this manner.]
5 [Meredith Skura's presentation deserves notice in this connection. She
told us that in her historical studies she generally eschews theory, preferring instead to
conceive of psychoanalysis simply as a way of thinking and an attitude toward life. Theory
enters her work, she said, only in the form of hypotheses that are to be tested by the
"so what?" criterion. If, for example, a particular Freudian tenet helps to
"pull details together" in an illuminating way, she knows that she was on the
right track.
Alas, any theory whatsoever-astrological, phrenological, ufological-will
"confirm" itself in just this specious manner. One must also ask whether the
global psychoanalytic "attitude toward life" doesn't amount to a partiality
toward Freudian theory. To eschew explicit theory while applying such an attitude is
simply to disguise one's premises from oneself, a retrogressive move in any field.]
6 [Judith Butler and Leo Bersani both implied that, for them, the
uppermost consideration in assessing a theoretical tenet should be its bearing on gay
liberation. In commenting on my own reference to community standards of empiricism, Butler
indicated that "community standards" sounded homophobic to her. Bersani, for his
part, distanced himself from the literary critic's typical ideal of "fidelity to the
text," since that fidelity, like Butler's "community," struck him as
sexually normative. Neither of these remarks precisely illustrated my point above, yet
both showed how an ideological imperative can override empirical concern, even covering
the very idea of evidence with suspicion of being socially oppressive.]
7 [In making this prediction, which was only partly fulfilled, I
overestimated the extent to which symposium participants would care about justifying their
claims. As the lone dissenter, I failed to attract more than momentary and dismissive
attention (as explained in note 4 above) to the issue of validation.]
8 [Arnold Cooper, a past president of the American Psychoanalytic
Association, assured us that the hypothesis of a dynamic unconscious is "now
evidentially well founded" and that Freud's basic method of "free association
and analytic listening" has amply proven its worth. Using those tools, he added,
"we have moved very far" from Freud's single model of the mind. Yes: we now have
an ever-expanding number of conflicting models and no agreed-upon way of choosing among
them. Is that progress, or does it constitute an indictment of the very tools that Cooper
regards as having been vindicated?]
9 Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum
to the Age of Prozac (New York: John Wiley, 1996), p. vii.
Crews, F. C. (1998). Unauthorized Freud : doubters confront a legend. New
York: Viking. ISBN: 0670872210 $24.95 - published AUGUST 1998
 Over the past thirty years, a revolution has occurred in the study of
Sigmund Freud and his brainchild, psychoanalysis. The Freud of legend - the lonely
scientific pioneer who steeled himself to place importance on his patients' unbidden
sexual revelations, cured their neuroses, and discovered the universal Oedipus complex
lurking within their memories - has been exposed as a fiction, a joint concoction of Freud
himself and his official biographer, Ernest Jones.
In Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend, Frederick Crews has
collected essays and exerpts from a wide range of scholars, biographers, and critics that
brilliantly make the revisionist case against Freud. According to Crews, the most
trenchant (and most frequently attacked) of Freud's critics, the emerging truth is that
Freud was a dogmatist who browbeat his patients and consistently failed to mark the
crucial difference between his patients' fantasies and his own. And while the heroic Freud
has thus been shrinking to human size, philosophers and psychologists have been finding
that psychoanalytic clinical evidence offers no credible support to the top-heavy,
tottering Freudian system of mental laws and powers.
It is still widely assumed, however, that only disturbed "Freud bashers"
would want to question Freud's achievement. That assumption cannot survive acquaintance
with Unauthorized Freud. Here we see, in the work of authors such as Frank J.
Sulloway, Peter Swales, Stanley Fish, and Ernest Gellner, the mistakes and deceptions
leading to the "discovery" of psychoanalysis proper; the logical considerations
that undermine Freudian assumptions about the meaning of dreams, symptoms, and slips; the
missteps that doomed Freud's case histories both as therapeutic interventions and as
illustrations of his theory; and finally, the personal costs incurred by disciples and
patients who were sacrificed to the master's monomaniacal ambition. According to Crews,
the conclusion is inescapable: the founder of psychoanalysis is the most overrated figure
in the history of medicine and science.
 
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Pitchford and Robert M. Young - Last updated:
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