Customer Reviews

Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience

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Cioffi's cricisms of Freud, freudian theory, and freudians is trenchant and exhaustive. It is, however, tough reading. He tends to be wordy and his sentence structure needlessly convoluted. It takes multipile readings to really understand what he is talking about, and it helps to have some background in philosophy, or at least in the revisionist Freud issues. That said, the book is a real contribution, with a new essay and several classic articles that are hard to get elsewhere. I highly recommend it. Frederick Crews once said that those still enamoured with freudian thought should be sentenced to a year's hard reading. This book would be an excellent part of that year's study.

Yep, convoluted, difficult, abstruse, and abstact and cerebrally dry to the point of being migraine-inducing. There are some gems here, but Cioffi seems obscessed with essentially meaningless issues such as what constitutes "testability," and "falsibility," and he rambles. In my view, a realistic assessment of depth psychology is that it had much to contribute, but Freud made many wrong turns and Psychoanalysis became a personality cult and secular religious cult. Most of his ideas were pure speculation (akin to Fliess' nutty association of nasal areas with female complaints), and were not borne out by work with his patients, except in the sense that he foisted them upon his patients, then subsequently used these case-histories to bolster his theories. And, no, this does not represent inductive reasoning or any kind of legitimate scientific pursuit. In the course of this work, when his patients complained, he accused them of harboring "resistance" simply because their material did not comport with his ideas. In his letters to Fliess (with whom he was very close--almost a kind of love-affair!), he complained that he was not able to resolve ANY of his cases at the time (around 17), which suggests that he was on the wrong track theoretically, or--alternately--a horribly ineffective therapist. His M.O. was to bully his charges with his preconceived hypotheses, not treat them with sensitivity and then record and analyze these sessions with scientific rigor. He admitted that he was more interested in being a "conquistador" than a healer (an outrageous admission for a physician!), and later that Analysis was probably not very effective as a therapeutic method. Clearly, Analysis became more and more a quasi-religious mission/prosyletizing effort, almost entirely focused on sex, and driven by Freud's need to stand as a Giant of Science and a liberator.

The basic concept of unconscious material dominating and coloring our lives, and that cathartic type processing (which Freud early-on discarded) being a means to help resolve this anguish and to reach wholeness is undeniable (despite what I consider some very oddball claims to the contrary), but Psychoanalysis very quickly stepped off this path, and got lost in a quagmire of odd intellectualizing (and weird Lamarkian reasoning), never once relinguishing the misapprehension that sex is at the basis of ALL behavior and mental processes. When figures like Jung, Groddeck, and Adler attempted to broaden this concept, Freud was livid at their "betrayal." This intellectualizing is perhaps akin to this author's going far afield in his verbose analysis, something like schizophrenic "word-salad": Nearly impossible of comprehension. To hell with "testability" (and "falsification," which, btw, is being used improperly by Karl Popper and Cioffi, as it denotes--strictly speaking--amenability to being make counterfit, rather than refutability). The majority of patients undergoing Analyis do not respond positively, as many do with other traditions. In fact, Analysis is abusive of the patient and manipulative. It is a kind of scam, masquerading as therapy.

Analysis is fundamentally speculative and arbitrary, and is not supported clinically. Instead of scientific grounding, its tenets comprise an appeal to authority. And, Analysis is not effective in resolving mental distress,* as some other traditions and techniques frequently are. Why? Because of its errors, exceedingly cerebral analytical pose, its way of manipulating the patient, rather than working with him in a rogerian-type, sensitive way, allowing the problematic material to naturally arise. Because of its elitism and arrogance. To many today, it is like "stone-age psychotherapy," to which we give the nod, in light of the value of depth psychology as a whole, and some legitimate accomplishments of Professor Freud. Yet, the specific discipline of Psychoanalysis has serious problems, even as Freud clearly suffered from serious character flaws..and it is a very odd phenomenon--indeed--how it has played such a powerful role in Eurpean and American medicine and culture, despite all the evidence in recent years which has undercut both Freud and Psychoanalysis. The only explanations I can see are the general credulity of humanity and the reality of Analysis as a kind of secular religious cult (and particularly related to the efforts of the stalwart American analysts), analogous to some funamentalist Christian ministers. Aside from a kind of messianic complex and his absolute obsession with sex as the sole drive in human behavior, Freud's career and practice were beset with serious ethical problems, which certainly must not be underestimated. Pseudo-science? Yes, absolutely.

* See, e.g., "Beyond Counseling and Psychotherapy," by Carkoff and Berenson, which features research suggesting that psychiatrists and analysts are among the least effective as therapists, even though they appear at the very top of the medical/academic "totem pole," and bring home very comfortable salaries, compared to other practitioners.