Freud has had a rough year. He’s been the subject of a small flood of hostile books, some challenging his personal and professional ethics, others the tenets of his work. In last year’s A Most Dangerous Method, a typical example of the genre, John Kerr traced the rift between Freud and Jung to a complex, sordid sexual psychodrama that involved both men in illicit affairs and a kind of mutual blackmail. In Seductive Mirage, also published last year, Allen Esterson purported to deconstruct Freud’s case histories to show that he regularly twisted facts to fit his theories. A recent cover story in Time magazine asked: “Is Freud Dead?” The authors, with the practiced equivocation typical of Time trend stories, answered: sort of, concluding that Freudianism, if hardly a science, has been at least an emotionally comforting superstition. But the critics they quoted are hardly so measured. “Psychoanalysis is built upon quicksand,” Frank Sulloway told Time. “It’s like a 10-story hotel sinking into an unsound foundation. And the analysts are in this building. You tell them it’s sinking, and they say, “It’s OK, we’re on the 10th floor.”‘
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Over the last decade or so, criticism of Freud has become even more intense and far-reaching. No longer is he taken to task for specific errors and failings; contemporary critics challenge his basic premises. The progress of Freud critic Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson–from disgruntled analyst to zealous opponent of therapy–is a case in point. In his 1984 book The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory, Masson accused Freud of dishonesty and cowardice, of covering up the evidence of sexual abuse suffered by his patients. Several years later, Masson declared himself unequivocally “against therapy” in a book of that name, rallying the troops for an all-out assault on the profession.
Another exemplar of the now-fashionable hostility toward Freud is literary critic Frederick Crews. Once a Freudian true believer, he’s now turned on the Old Man with a strident, unfocused anger. In a famous 1980 Commentary article that helped to usher in the current age of Freud bashing, Crews predicted with undisguised satisfaction that psychoanalysis would “fade away just as mesmerism and phrenology did, and for the same reason: its exploded pretensions will deprive it of recruits.” Such rhetoric had its intended effect–further undermining the reputation of Freud and his “science.” (The Time magazine authors, in what is perhaps an unconscious tribute to Crews, also compare psychoanalysis to “phrenology or mesmerism or any of the other pseudosciences that once offered unsubstantiated answers or false solace.”) Crews has kept up the attack in the years since he predicted the collapse of psychoanalysis. In a New York Review of Books essay last fall–which caused a predictable stir among analysts–he described psychoanalysis as little more than a modern superstition, ineffective at best and dangerous at worst, a process producing “a good many more converts than cures.” Like Masson, Crews focuses his attack on the Old Man in his youth, describing derisively the “haphazard” origins of this “pseudoscience.” It’s not clear to me how Crews can base so much of his argument on the mistakes Freud made in the early years of his practice, however; Freud learned from many of his mistakes, and other analysts have learned more since. One wonders how Crews imagines “real” science is done: Are mistakes forbidden? Are modern chemists, say, somehow implicated in the mistakes of their alchemist forbears?
The fallacies of Masson and Crews would matter little if they were isolated cases, but they’re not. These are perhaps the two most influential critics of Freud–at least outside of the profession–yet too often their arguments have gone unexamined. Masson’s basic premise in Assault on Truth has become, in watered-down form, the standard interpretation of Freud among certain feminists–contemporary Women’s Studies majors absorb Masson’s accusations as if they were unquestionable truths. And Crews’s brand of sophisticated sarcasm has spread far beyond the subscription rolls of Commentary and the New York Review of Books. “Everybody knows that Freud has fallen from grace,” Paul Robinson notes in his thoughtful recent book Freud and His Critics, which takes on the sophistries of Masson and several other leading Freud bashers. “Whenever I have told someone that I was writing a book about him, the response has almost invariably been the same: “Hasn’t he been disproved?’ Or I have been asked about the latest scandal from the newspapers: “Wasn’t he a cocaine addict?’ “Didn’t he lie about his patients being sexually abused?”‘
Masson and Crews may see therapy as an attempt to force the lives of innocent patients to fit Freud’s preconceived narratives, but to many patients therapy offers the chance to lead spontaneous lives. “Meaning in personal experience is composed of narratives,” Mitchell notes. “The narratives that the patient brings into treatment are generally stereotyped and closed. A central part of what the analyst adds is imagination . . . a capacity to envision different endings, different futures.” This is a far cry from Masson’s caricature of therapy as a form of domination.
Hope and Dread in Psychoanalysis by Stephen A. Mitchell, Basic Books, $30.
