Freud's Big Idea

Ben Shapiro describes Freud as a "a charlatan, a phenomenal publicist but a devastatingly terrible practicing psychologist. He was a quack who routinely prescribed measures damaging to patients, then wrote fictional papers bragging about his phenomenal results". Kosslyn and Rosenberg ask if Freudian theory is science? "In short, the answer is 'no'". Tom Burns (a psychiatrist) critiques Freud as being ineffective and not treating patient's as though they have a disease of the mind. Curiously, Thomas Szasz (an anti-psychiatrist) critiques Freud for the exact opposite; treating patients too much as though they have a disease.

Freud's influence can not be overstated, and now, it feels like vogue to critique him for one thing or another. Since I have been influenced by Szasz in my thinking, as well as a defender for him in the past, I never thought I would write a defence of Freud. This is not to say that my defence of Freud is without limits - in fact, this is not an endorsement. Many authors mischaracterise Freud, take him out of context, or focus on the wrong things. For instance, many people focus (because sex sells) on Freud's more sensual theories. For instance, people will introduce Freud through a theory like "penis envy" and not give any explanation of where it came from. I want to draw attention to these aspects of Freud and hopefully we can all move on.

Freud's work doesn't need to be scientific. Not everything has to be hard science. There is room in life for things beyond peer reviewed studies and spreadsheets calculating Pearson coefficients. Freud was first a doctor, who had many deeply disturbed patients. These people were suffering. Whether the reason for that was a logical consequence of personal life circumstances (Szaszian view) or an illness of the mind (psychiatrist view) is more or less of no consequence. At the time, Freud and his contemporaries knew nothing of this. Modern living was creating a new kind of person, personality and suffering which nobody was equipped to handle. What do you do when suddenly your city is filled with thousands of neurotic people who are otherwise perfectly healthy? Freud was trying to help these people with virtually no prior research and no support. If one thing can be said about Freud it is that he identified a rising trend in modern life.

First, as I alluded to, an overemphasis on Freud's sexual theories seems to be common. Like a gang of giggling school girls, people focus on his focus on sexual theories. Why does Freud have so many sexual theories? A question often not asked. The answer comes to the nature of his practice - he was working almost exclusively with a particular group of people. Middle aged, middle class, women, who had serious relationship issues and were often very neurotic. For Freud, the patient creates the theory. Working with this narrow range of women who had primarily sexual issues, it was no wonder that sexual issues became the core of his theories.

For the reasons explained, criticising Freud for being inconsistent with himself is not valid. Freud worked on an a small and narrow range of patients. His ideas were focused on attempting to cure each individual patient that was before him in the moment. His ideas evolve over time with his patients. He is hand crafting new theories to help this patient, like a lawyer who writes a unique defence for each client. Kosslyn and Rosenberg write

Consider this: Freud believed that many actions and objects have symbolic meanings. Thus, long, thin objects, for instance, are phallic symbols—they stand for a penis. However, when Freud was asked about the meaning of his sucking on a cigar (his interviewer assumed that the cigar was a phallic symbol), Freud replied, “Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar.” Maybe so, but a good theory would tell us when it is and when it isn’t “only a cigar.” Without specific principles that indicate precisely when long, thin objects are and are not phallic symbols, researchers cannot adequately test the concepts at the heart of the theory.

When is a cigar just a cigar? When the patient doesn't need it to be.

An overlooked aspect in The Interpretation of Dreams is that dreams are a psychological phenomena. Again, here, many people will read the book and laser focus in on the sexual and perverted dreams. In my opinion, Freud does not emphasise these so much and he only brings them up to emphasise a particular point which seems lost - dreams are a psychological phenomena. This might seem like a strange point to bring up, but many people still do not seem to understand this. For instance, he is constantly citing earlier thinkers who dismiss dreams as "random nerve activity" or "caused by sleeping on the back" and so on.

Consider this personal anecdote. My grandmother died when I was 17, in late November. She had been in care for around a year or so after suffering a stroke. Her condition was more stable, and so my Father was looking forward to her coming over for Christmas. Unfortunately, she suffered an accident and passed away. On Christmas day, my father said he had a dream about his mother that night. He said it was an amazing "coincidence" and the rest of the family seemed to agree with this sentiment; as though dreams fall into our heads from the sky at random. I was astonished - no, of course, the mind created the dream. It was influenced by his emotions (grief) and his desires (mother celebrating Christmas). This was the core aspect of The Interpretation of Dreams which I am totally convinced by.

All this being said, Freud was for the most part incorrect. This is okay. The human race will not always be right about everything the first time. I think a good analogy is the ancient Greeks. They made many claims about physics, some of which turned out to be right and some of which turned out to be wrong. Physics textbooks might mention how the problems they are addressing were first addressed by the Greeks in the preface to give some colour and charm to the book. Maybe to emphasise that the student is studying something that humans have been thinking about for thousands of years. However, it would be unbecoming for physics textbooks to be page after page of debate around the merits of ancient Greek physics. In the same way, can we please move on from Freud? Not every textbook needs to open with a lengthy description of why "penis envy" isn't real, for the one thousandth time. We get it. Freud has become a spectre haunting anyone who dares study the mind.

References

Shapiro, B. (2019) The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great. New York: Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers.

Kosslyn, S.M. and Rosenberg, R.S. (2020) Introducing Psychology: Brain, Person, Group. Boston: Flatworld.

Burns, T. (2006) Psychiatry: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.

Freud, S. (1997) The Interpretation of Dreams. Hertfordshire, England: Wordsworth Editions. Originally published 1899

Szasz, T. (2003) The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct. New York: Harper & Row. Originally published 1961