Dr. Freud, Paging Dr. Freud!

One of the monster classes I took at the University of Texas in the early 1970s was Psychology 301. It included an overview of the writings and theories of the key figures in that field: B.F Skinner, Ivan Pavlov, Jean Piaget, William James, Erik Erikson, Carl Rogers, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler and Sigmund Freud. I would venture that most of us undergraduates were vaguely aware of Pavlov and his tests with salivating dogs. But we certainly knew about Freud, the legendary founder of psychoanalysis.

He was born of Jewish parents (in later adulthood, he referred to himself sardonically as a “shabby old Jew”) in 1856 in Freiburg, Austria. Freud earned a medical degree from the University of Vienna in his mid-20s, specializing in neuropathology. An affiliated professor, he set up a private clinical practice in 1886. Freud, his wife and children lived at 19 Berggasse in the city’s Alsergrund district. There he wrote, held meetings and saw patients for 47 years. He almost stayed too long before fleeing to exile in London because the Nazis were taking over. He died of mouth cancer in 1939; Freud, who smoked an average of 20 cigars per day (he favored Don Pedros and Reina Cubanas), rationalized that this habit facilitated his prodigious work schedule. He refused to stop burning stogies and denied that they were in any way problematic. On a somewhat related issue, Freud was an enthusiastic user and advocate of cocaine early in his career. Clueless about its addictive and destructive qualities, he gave it to his patients. He insisted that it would allow them to more fully engage in “free association.” Cocaine—then an entirely legal, over-the-counter drug—is said to have heavily influenced one of his masterworks, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899).

Freud was a smart guy, well-educated and quite sure of his role in exploring and elucidating human nature. His impact in the realm of psychology was nothing short of revolutionary. Indeed, his ideas permeate Western culture even today. But he’s not the messianic figure he purported to be. Psychoanalysis has fallen out of favor in academia, and few doctors of the mind use it today in clinical practice. It’s an outdated paradigm. And many of the things he did with his neurotic middle-class Viennese patients a century ago would bring charges of malpractice, lawsuits or even prison if he tried them now.

“Some of Freud’s cases just don’t stand up in light of historical fact,” said Anthony Stadlen, a research fellow at the Freud Museum in London. Stadlen and others have helped pull back the veil of secrecy surrounding Freud, and most of what is revealed is unflattering. His treatment of “Little Hans,” “Dora” and “Anna O” was bad enough, but how about manipulating two patients (Horace Frink and Anjelika Bijur) into divorcing their spouses and marrying each other, so that he could receive a big financial reward? I am leaving out some sordid details from the scandal, which happened in the 1920s. His supporters managed to keep it quiet.

There were numerous other ethical breaches. This charlatan cooked data and engaged in what is—from a modern perspective—clearly pseudo-science. According to Dr. Frank J. Sulloway, “Freud’s case histories are rampant with censorship, distortions, highly dubious ‘reconstructions,’ and exaggerated claims.” He used rhetoric instead of empirical evidence and sought to convince readers and patients that his theories would not make sense until they abandoned their “resistance.” He was emphatic that only a person who had undergone psychoanalysis could become a psychoanalyst. Such education, if it may be so called, took place within privately controlled institutes and was not subject to peer review at universities and medical schools. I realize that life was different in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but I cannot see how this did not raise red flags.

The young Freud, hostile to his father and jealous of his relationship with his mother, extrapolated that to all boys. Voila—the Oedipus complex! Boys are afraid of being castrated, leading to neurosis and conflict. Girls (all girls), in turn, envy boys for their male organs. Female hysteria, practically universal among distaff persons, derives from the vagina. As I read these things in my textbook at UT, I was more than puzzled. I was outraged. I did not believe any of it and felt loathing for Freud. Feminists like Simon de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan and Shulamith Firestone have given the bourgeois arch-chauvinist both barrels, and they were right to do so. His thoughts on homosexuality now draw scorn. Although he still has his defenders, Freud these days is more ignored than disputed.

I question the existence of the id, the ego and the superego if only because they were postulated by Sigmund Freud. How much did he do, really, to benefit people’s mental and emotional health? I will close with a quote from another of his many critics, Dr. Todd Dufresne: “Freud is truly in a class of his own. Arguably no other notable figure in history was so fantastically wrong about nearly every important thing he had to say. But, luckily for him, academics have been—and still are—infinitely creative in their efforts to whitewash his errors, even as lay readers grow increasingly dumbfounded by the entire mess.”