The reputation of Sigmund Freud has scarcely known a day of peace. It has been under steady assault since Freud unveiled his theory of human personality at the end of the last century. A respected Viennese doctor who attended one of Freud's famous lectures dismissed Freudian ideas as "a scientific fairy tale." Twenty years later, the Nation took note of Freud's "ingeniously obscene imagination" and suggested that he could " discover a sexual motive in a binomial theorem." In the 1950s, neuroscientist MacDonald Critchley identified psychoanalysis as "the treatment of the id by the odd." And today, the average psychology textbook relegates Freud to the status of historical footnote. You would think that psychoanalytic theory, sickly even at birth, would by now have been laid to rest. Why would anyone still bother to attack it?
One who would, and does, is Frederick Crews, a former professor of English at Berkeley and a veteran Freud-basher. His The Memory Wars (New York Review of Books, 299 pages, $ 22.95) consists of two essays that appeared in the New York Review of Books, accompanied by some of the correspondence they provoked. The first essay, "The Unknown Freud," criticizes FreudJan theory proper; the second, "The Revenge of the Repressed," assails the " recoveredmemory movement," which Crews regards as the "stepchild" of psychoanalysis. These essays make clear that we should continue to care about Freud because his legacy is alive and kicking -- with effects that are far from benign. Moreover, we should worry about the stubbornly irrational turn of mind revealed in the correspondence defending Freudian theory and psychoanalysis.
"The Unknown Freud" is a withering account of Freud as man, theorist, and therapist. The picture that emerges is of a corrupt, celebrity-hungry Machiavellian who cares more about his own reputation than about his clients, or the truth. Freud writes letters to colleagues while his patients are under hypnosis. He naps while they free-associate. He is "indifferent to [their] suffering and quite dismissive of their real-world dilemmas." He constructs psychoanalytic explanations for conditions whose origins are clearly physiological, as in the case of Emma Eckstein, "whom Freud had grotesquely misdiagnosed as 'bleeding for love" [for Freud], whereas she was actually suffering from a half-meter of gauze... accidentally left within the remains of her nose" following surgery. Protdgs who object to the way he runs his ship, he tosses overboard.
Crews's Freud, in short, is not an attractive figure. You would not want him to come to dinner or marry your daughter. But that alone is not enough to demolish Freudian theory, and Crews knows this. His critique does not rest on character assassination but rather on Freud's poor habits as a scientist (motivated by his "appetite for fame") and on the anti-scientific nature of his theory. Thus, we are treated to a Freud who embellishes, fudges, and even fabricates evidence for the sake of self-promotion. For his seduction hypothesis, the centerpiece of early Freudian theory, "Freud himself laid down the outlines of the seduction plots, which were then fleshed out from " clues" supplied by his bewildered and frightened patients, whose signs of distress he took to be proof that his constructions were correct." This is a " different Freud from the canonical one... quite lacking in the empirical and ethical scruples that we would hope to find in any responsible scientist, to say nothing of a major one."
"The Unknown Freud" quite rightly focuses on the ways in which Freudian theory falls pathetically short of science, rehearsing the usual litany: Psychoanalytic theory depends on anecdote, unfounded inference, the confusion of speculation with fact, generalization from a small number of cases, ill- defined and untestable theoretical constructs, self-confirmatory hypotheses, rejection of rival explanations, and so on. In sum, "what a psychoanalytic explanation tells us," Crews says, "is itself."
But despite all this, Freud could still be right. And if the theory is unrestable, is there any way of finding out? Crews applies the right kind of strategy for assessing an untestable theory in the second essay, "The Revenge of the Repressed," his indictment of the recovered-memory movement, which he describes as a "frenzy that is deluding countless patients... into launching false charges of sexual abuse against their dumbfounded and mortified elders." Crews wants Freud to accept his share of the blame for the recovered-memory movement because it borrows from him its premises as well as its primary therapeutic tool, the uncovering of repressed memories.
Recovered-memory therapy depends on the idea that people tuck the memories of traumatic events in childhood deep into the hidden recesses of the mind. It further relies on the notion that these memories can be called up with professional help. Freud's ideas about repression are naturally at the heart of the movement. As with other FreudJan concepts, it is hard to imagine how we can disprove that repression occurs, as any claim on Patient Smith's part that he has not repressed memories is answered with the counterclaim that Patient Smith believes this only because he is repressing.
Crews addresses this problem by citing evidence from the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus regarding how memory works. Loftus's empirical research, writes Crews, "has established that memory is inherently sketchy, reconstructive, and unlocalizable. Whether pleasant or unpleasant, it decays drastically over time, though less so if the experience in question gets periodically "rehearsed" just the opposite of what the retrievers" theory would predict." Memory is "easily corrupted," both by the deliberate or unwitting intervention of an experimenter or therapist and by the normal intrusion of subsequent experience. Loftus's findings offer "no encourage" ment to the retrievers' notion that "videotaped' records of events are stored in a special part of the brain and then suddenly yielded up to near-perfect recall."
Actually, the case against Freud - an repression of early childhood memories is even stronger, because there is good reason to believe that retrievable memories are not reliably laid down by young children. Human beings are notoriously bad at remembering what happened to them in infancy and early childhood. The cause of childhood amnesia seems in part to be structural, not motivational. The hippocampus, without which memories of events cannot be recalled, is late to mature and does not approximate adult levels of functioning until two years of age. The prefrontal cortex, which is also part of the memory pathway, is not wired up at birth. The immature brain is simply not a very hospitable environment for memories, to be buried or summoned forth.
Hence, an untestable theory -- even a self-confirming theory -- can be disconfirmed if incompatible evidence is available. Crews exploits the Loftus research as an antidote to Freud's idea of repression. Other key Freudian constructs are similarly vulnerable to this sort of medicine, although Crews does not really do the work needed to make a larger case. The human mind as it is being described today by the empirical sciences simply does not look like the Freudian mind and cannot sustain the stories that Freud was interested in telling.
Crews's correspondents seem implicitly to acknowledge this. They are not generally interested in making the case for the rightness of Freudian theory. Some of them attempt to distance themselves from Freud's tactics without, Crews observes, recognizing the "awkward fact that their method of making " advances in insight" remains as subjective as his own." Others offer their own new-and-improved interpretations of Freud's cases or invoke later, better psychoanalytic theorists, like Erik Erikson, the poet-psychologist who changed his name from Erik Holmberg to Erikson H. Erikson and then tried to convince the world that an adolescent identity crisis is an inevitable part of growing up. Other correspondents resort to anecdotage about therapeutic success rates. Still others see in Crews's attack on the master a transparent Freudian defensive maneuver. One of them, speaking for Freud himself, declared that "they may attack my theories by day, but they dream of them at night."
Why does Freud continue to have such a hold on so large a public, despite the fact that his theories are without empirical support? Several years ago in Time, Paul Gray wrote that, despite his failings, Freud "still managed to create an intellectual edifice that feels closer to the experience of living, and therefore hurting, than any other system currently in play. What he bequeathed was not... a science." Indeed, "[psychoanalysis] and all its offshoots may in the final analysis turn out to be no more reliable than phrenology or mesmerism or any of the countless other pseudosciences that once offered unsubstantiated answers or false solace."
So why sustain the romance? Because, as Gray noted, "the reassurances provided by Freud that our inner lives are rich with drama and hidden meanings would be missed if [they] disappeared, leaving nothing in [their] place." This kind of special pleading reflects the sentiments of the letter writers in The Memory Wars. It also reflects the woolly thinking in evidence on TV talk shows, in Psychology Today, and elsewhere. As long as that is the case, we still need to care, to worry, about Freud. We should also worry about a society that values feeling over thinking and sentimentality over science, producing mushy minds that see their own reflections in the fairy tales of Sigmund Freud.
Gwen J. Broude teaches psychology and cognitive science at Vassar College