You write a lovely summary of the good ideas that Freud popularized, but don’t mention the profoundly damaging ideas that he also popularized. The most famous was replacing his seduction theory with the Oedipal theory as written about by Jeffrey Masson in his book Assault on Truth and his 1984 Atlantic article: Freud and the Seduction Theory.
So I feel that your article is unbalanced—whitewashing even—and as someone who has been harmed by Freud’s ideas I feel a need to say something. He influenced therapists to deny incest, and more generally he deflected patients from focusing on any of the abuse inflicted on them by their families.
Consider the example you mention of the psychoanalyst saying to their patient “the root of your problems is hatred of your father.” This is the kind of psychic conflict that psychoanalysts are still focused on. They are not nearly so interested in what the father did to provoke the hatred.
They say they believe in repression, but they prefer to focus on the emotions and desires that are repressed rather than the memories of the abuse so many of us have suffered from fathers and other family members.
A fair and insightful piece. In my view, Freud’s great innovation was not to propose that there are mental processes outside of our waking knowledge and control (the early modern hierarchy of mental faculties, for example, is a similar concept), but to posit that these different versions of the self could be brought into dialogue in a therapeutic process. One simply can’t get around the immensity of this simple shift in thinking, whether in mental health or the broader culture.
For anyone interested in learning more in depth: Contemporary Psychodynamic Psychotherapy for Children and Adolescents by Delgado et al is a great textbook. Even if you aren't interested in therapy with children per se the beginning chapters do an amazing job of introducing contemporary psychoanalytic thought.
This is so good! Yes yes yes! Thank you for this perspective! I agree that some psychoanalytic theories, such as the Oedipus Complex, are not amenable to empirical study because they are not “falsifiable” as Popper would have described them. To call the Oedipus Complex a scientific theory and to place it akin to Einstein's theory of general relativity or Darwin’s theory of evolution, is not appropriate because unlike the latter it can not be empirically verified with a positivist scientific approach. This – I will grant but also over time psychoanalysis has acknowledged this aspect and in the last fifty years there has been a general stepping away from the concrete interpretations of Freud’s day and from the belief that they are scientific facts. There has been a movement toward understanding that meaning in the psychoanalytic space is not discovered by the analyst, objectively excavated, but rather it is co-created by both the therapist and the client.
The practice of psychoanalysis is much closer to a hermeneutic system than scientific methodology (which is probably why it is so much easier for the Humanities to integrate) but just because some of theories are not amenable to positivist study does not mean they are any less useful, any less truth.
So yes, certain specific psychoanalytic theories can not be studied empirically but I think Karl Jasper said it best, “knowledge is not a smooth expanse of universal and equivalent truths, but an ordered structure with quite diverse kinds of validity, importance, and essence.” Philosophy is not amenable to positivist or empirical study, nor is Shakespere, or any Literature for that matter, Art, or Religion — I shudder to imagine how impoverished our understanding of the human condition would be without them.
However psychoanalytic treatment approaches as a whole can be studied empirically. We can study empirically whether people who engage in therapy which uses a psychodynamic approach have decreased psychological distress, increased functional capacity, and decreased maladaptive coping skills. There have been countless studies showing its long-term efficacy; see the work of Fonagy, Yakeley, Leichsenring, Shedler, and Knekt – just to name a few, the list goes on and on.
I personslly love psychoanalysis because I find the field an invaluable conterbalance to simplistic and reductive approaches of understanding and descrbing psychological suffering and psychopathology. The people dedicated to it (generally speaking) are running headlong in the opposite direction from the highly reductive approach to understanding psychological suffering Ive been made to practice during residency and fellowship - the one most commonly practiced in traditional mental health systems. In those traditional health sysyems I have been taught to extract someones life story in about 60 minutes then turn it into an DSM diagnosis and use EBM algorithms to "treat" it - mostly with consideration for which meds to prescribe and recommended theraputic modality an after thought if not completely ignored.
I think the most effective balances the two perspectives, a psychoanalytic understanding is individualized and tentative - capable of holding space for the unknown and mysteries inherent in being / consciousness. The DSM approach is useful (even if not necessarily valid) because it gives us a label/category of suffering and allows us come closer to agreement about its characteristics; that way my schizophrenia is your schizophrenia- this is invaluable to certain kinds of research / scientific inquiry and EBM holds us accountable to using medications within the limits of their studied efficacy.
I'm so grateful for this piece precisely because I feel the pendulum has swung too far in most of our current institutions of care toward an unbalanced DSM / EBM approach. It is stultifying and both patients and practioners suffer when our understanding of the human condition is reduced in such a way.
Never throughout the entire Oxford IPPP series have I seen a single work cite Pierre Janet, Freud's second adversary next to Jung. Even the recent "Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology" by Stanghellini et al. gets it wrong. Indeed, my prior battles with a self-identified "history of psychology" professor confirm there is an international agenda, within IPPP itself, to promote Freud and censor the writings that he plagiarized and then twisted to his own agenda: Janet. The majority of them ("30,000 pages of essays" per Craparo et al below) were not translated to English until the 1980s, when the damage was already done. They continue to be translated to this day here:
Howell, E. & Itzkowitz, S. (2016). The dissociative mind in psychoanalysis (2nd ed). NY: Routledge.
Craparo, G., Ortu, F., & Onno van der Hart. (2019). Rediscovering Pierre Janet: trauma, dissociation, and a new context for psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge.
Janet, P., Craparo, G., van der Hart, O., (2021). Catalepsy, Memory and Suggestion in Psychological Automatism. Routledge.
Craparo, G., & Onno van der Hart. (2022). Subconscious acts, anesthesia, and psychological disaggregation in psychological automatism: Partial automatism. New York: Routledge.
You write a lovely summary of the good ideas that Freud popularized, but don’t mention the profoundly damaging ideas that he also popularized. The most famous was replacing his seduction theory with the Oedipal theory as written about by Jeffrey Masson in his book Assault on Truth and his 1984 Atlantic article: Freud and the Seduction Theory.
So I feel that your article is unbalanced—whitewashing even—and as someone who has been harmed by Freud’s ideas I feel a need to say something. He influenced therapists to deny incest, and more generally he deflected patients from focusing on any of the abuse inflicted on them by their families.
Consider the example you mention of the psychoanalyst saying to their patient “the root of your problems is hatred of your father.” This is the kind of psychic conflict that psychoanalysts are still focused on. They are not nearly so interested in what the father did to provoke the hatred.
They say they believe in repression, but they prefer to focus on the emotions and desires that are repressed rather than the memories of the abuse so many of us have suffered from fathers and other family members.
A fair and insightful piece. In my view, Freud’s great innovation was not to propose that there are mental processes outside of our waking knowledge and control (the early modern hierarchy of mental faculties, for example, is a similar concept), but to posit that these different versions of the self could be brought into dialogue in a therapeutic process. One simply can’t get around the immensity of this simple shift in thinking, whether in mental health or the broader culture.
For anyone interested in learning more in depth: Contemporary Psychodynamic Psychotherapy for Children and Adolescents by Delgado et al is a great textbook. Even if you aren't interested in therapy with children per se the beginning chapters do an amazing job of introducing contemporary psychoanalytic thought.
This is so good! Yes yes yes! Thank you for this perspective! I agree that some psychoanalytic theories, such as the Oedipus Complex, are not amenable to empirical study because they are not “falsifiable” as Popper would have described them. To call the Oedipus Complex a scientific theory and to place it akin to Einstein's theory of general relativity or Darwin’s theory of evolution, is not appropriate because unlike the latter it can not be empirically verified with a positivist scientific approach. This – I will grant but also over time psychoanalysis has acknowledged this aspect and in the last fifty years there has been a general stepping away from the concrete interpretations of Freud’s day and from the belief that they are scientific facts. There has been a movement toward understanding that meaning in the psychoanalytic space is not discovered by the analyst, objectively excavated, but rather it is co-created by both the therapist and the client.
The practice of psychoanalysis is much closer to a hermeneutic system than scientific methodology (which is probably why it is so much easier for the Humanities to integrate) but just because some of theories are not amenable to positivist study does not mean they are any less useful, any less truth.
So yes, certain specific psychoanalytic theories can not be studied empirically but I think Karl Jasper said it best, “knowledge is not a smooth expanse of universal and equivalent truths, but an ordered structure with quite diverse kinds of validity, importance, and essence.” Philosophy is not amenable to positivist or empirical study, nor is Shakespere, or any Literature for that matter, Art, or Religion — I shudder to imagine how impoverished our understanding of the human condition would be without them.
However psychoanalytic treatment approaches as a whole can be studied empirically. We can study empirically whether people who engage in therapy which uses a psychodynamic approach have decreased psychological distress, increased functional capacity, and decreased maladaptive coping skills. There have been countless studies showing its long-term efficacy; see the work of Fonagy, Yakeley, Leichsenring, Shedler, and Knekt – just to name a few, the list goes on and on.
I personslly love psychoanalysis because I find the field an invaluable conterbalance to simplistic and reductive approaches of understanding and descrbing psychological suffering and psychopathology. The people dedicated to it (generally speaking) are running headlong in the opposite direction from the highly reductive approach to understanding psychological suffering Ive been made to practice during residency and fellowship - the one most commonly practiced in traditional mental health systems. In those traditional health sysyems I have been taught to extract someones life story in about 60 minutes then turn it into an DSM diagnosis and use EBM algorithms to "treat" it - mostly with consideration for which meds to prescribe and recommended theraputic modality an after thought if not completely ignored.
I think the most effective balances the two perspectives, a psychoanalytic understanding is individualized and tentative - capable of holding space for the unknown and mysteries inherent in being / consciousness. The DSM approach is useful (even if not necessarily valid) because it gives us a label/category of suffering and allows us come closer to agreement about its characteristics; that way my schizophrenia is your schizophrenia- this is invaluable to certain kinds of research / scientific inquiry and EBM holds us accountable to using medications within the limits of their studied efficacy.
I'm so grateful for this piece precisely because I feel the pendulum has swung too far in most of our current institutions of care toward an unbalanced DSM / EBM approach. It is stultifying and both patients and practioners suffer when our understanding of the human condition is reduced in such a way.
Never throughout the entire Oxford IPPP series have I seen a single work cite Pierre Janet, Freud's second adversary next to Jung. Even the recent "Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology" by Stanghellini et al. gets it wrong. Indeed, my prior battles with a self-identified "history of psychology" professor confirm there is an international agenda, within IPPP itself, to promote Freud and censor the writings that he plagiarized and then twisted to his own agenda: Janet. The majority of them ("30,000 pages of essays" per Craparo et al below) were not translated to English until the 1980s, when the damage was already done. They continue to be translated to this day here:
Howell, E. & Itzkowitz, S. (2016). The dissociative mind in psychoanalysis (2nd ed). NY: Routledge.
Craparo, G., Ortu, F., & Onno van der Hart. (2019). Rediscovering Pierre Janet: trauma, dissociation, and a new context for psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge.
Janet, P., Craparo, G., van der Hart, O., (2021). Catalepsy, Memory and Suggestion in Psychological Automatism. Routledge.
Craparo, G., & Onno van der Hart. (2022). Subconscious acts, anesthesia, and psychological disaggregation in psychological automatism: Partial automatism. New York: Routledge.