Re the discussion on Freud, I agree entirely with Chris and the other TIPSters that Freud's ideas should be discussed in psychology classes (though, of course, not taught as "discoveries" as they once were). I have, however, one caveat. Unfortunately virtually all psychology texts give unintentionally bowderised versions of his theories, i.e., they are generally presented a cleaned-up form that leaves out the more absurd elements.
Please forgive a personal account to make my point. I first started researching Freud's writings over twenty years ago after reading the "Wolf Man" case history and deciding to write a critique of its manifold absurdities and what became evident was the *invention* of the "solution" to the case, a "scene" that the patient supposedly (and all too conveniently) came to recall from infancy after four years of analysis. (This followed Freud's premature assertion in a polemical section against Adler in the "History of the Psychoanalytic Movement" that he was current dealing with a case that would confirm his sexual theories. Before people start to think in terms of *suggested* recovered memories, the Wolf Man later reported that he had *no* memory of the crucial individual in the "scene" in question.) It was only after recognising that Freud's ever-changing retrospective accounts of the seduction theory episode were at variance with the claims in the original 1896 papers (something Frank Cioffi had already pointed out in a little known article published in 1974) that I set out to write a 'popular' book on Freud's claims and theories. What I recall saying to myself over and over again as I read more and more of his writings was "How can anyone take this stuff seriously?". For instance, people (and Beth cites this) know that Freud stated that what happens to you as a child can have influence on later life (something that I believe the Jesuits were well aware of a few centuries ago). How many people (including the authors of psychology texts) are aware that in his seminal "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" Freud stated that an individual's unconscious impressions of (conjectured) 'memories' of infantile masturbation "determine [sic] the development of his character, if he is to remain healthy, and the symptomatology of his neurosis, if he is to fall ill after puberty"? [SE 7, p. 189]. I could multiply such absurdities over many pages, but you won't find these in psychology texts, which make his theories sound at least reasonable, even if mostly erroneous. At one time (thanks largely to his self-portrayal and the writings of his followers) Freud was regarded as a man of "absolute integrity", a view increasingly challenged in recent times. But still, when, for instance, the early Freud is mentioned in relation to cocaine, how often is it also pointed out that he claimed a case of the use of cocaine to cure addiction to morphine which we now know was false, and later lied about the method of ingesting cocaine he had recommended in order to defend his position in the face of increasing reports of cocaine addiction? See: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n08/print/borc01_.html Why does this episode in his early history matter? Because it is a pattern that continued in his later career. In an article published in 1898 he claimed for his new analytic technique "a great number of successes", cases of such difficulty that they made the test of his technique "all the more convincing". This was at the very time his was reporting to his friend Wilhelm Fliess that his current cases were "proceeding especially poorly. I shall not finish a single one this year either". Psychology texts (and popular accounts) generally report Freud's clinical 'findings' uncritically, but what we have are his *reports* of what happened. So we get accounts of the epoch-making cures of the *Studies on Hysteria* period - as Freud told it. No one seems to ask if the oft-repeated stories are reliable ("when the patients were brought to remember the traumatic episodes their symptoms disappeared"), or ask how there could have been successful cures in 1890-1894 when in 1896 he tells the world that hysteria and obsessional neurosis can *only* be cured if deeply unconscious memories of infantile sexual abuse are accessed in the course of therapy (something not claimed for a single one of numerous 'successful' cases in *Studies* and his earlier papers). I'd better stop there (on this topic)! My point is that, yes, Freud's ideas should be discussed in psychology courses. But I wish that the authors of psychology texts would include the absurdities along with the cleaned-up theories, and make clear that the historical research of recent decades (since the 1970s) has shown that the traditional accounts of Freud's clinical experiences are unreliable. Beth wrote: > [...] That said, it's easy enough to explain all the problems with > his work: no empirical studies, too few subjects, all middle-class > Viennese women [not men], and not even good notes from Freud > during his sessions, etc. If I may say so, the point about "all middle-class women" is overstated. First, one third of the seduction theory patients were men (though if you go by Masson you'd never know that). Second, the background of the patients was largely irrelevant, in this sense: Freud always had a preconceived idea of what he expected to find, and since his basic notion was that the origin of the problems lay in *unconscious* ideas or memories, and he used analytic reconstruction and interpretation to 'uncover' these 'memories', he was always going to 'confirm' his theories. It is true, however, that his patients were *predominantly* female - which makes it all the more revealing that as late as 1935 he wrote: "The information about infantile sexuality was obtained from the study of men and the theory deduced from it was concerned with male children." How come, since his patients when the theories were first formulated were predominantly women? Because his developmental theories had little to do with the experiences of his patients, and much to do with ideas in his own head. Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London http://www.esterson.org ---
