FINAL ANALYSIS
Just when you thought psychoanalysis was dead, battered by managed
care, Prozac, and neuroscience, word arrives that it is very much alive.
There are more patients undergoing analysis and more shrinks in training
in 1998 than in 1968. Of course, psychoanalysis (PA) no longer belongs
just to medicine, where the surest way to get a laugh is to say "penis
envy" to a gathering of psychiatrists. Instead, social workers are buying
couches, and psychoanalytic theory is positively thriving in history and
literature departments. Love it or hate it, PA changed the way we think
of ourselves. (If castration anxiety just doesn't do it for you anymore,
remember Freud once declared cigars a substitute for masturbation.) When
the American Journal of Psychiatry ceded Freud to the New York Review of
Books, PA lost much of its cultural cachet. But it gained shelfspace.
Recently, dozens of tomes and articles have intensified the Freud wars.
Herewith, some major combattants.--The Editors
LEGEND
[*] = FREUDOMETER
FREUDOMETER PERSON EXPERTISE
[*][*][*] FREDERICK CREWS English
[*][*]
[*][*][*] ARNOLD CCOPER, M.D. psychiatry
[*][*]
[*][*][*] FRANK J. SULLOWAY research
[*][*] in neuroscience
[*][*][*] ROBERT MICHELS, M.D. psychiatry
[*][*][*] JUDITH BUTLER literature
[*][*][*] PETER GAY history;
[*] applies PA
to study of
history
[*][*][*] ERIC R. KANDEL., M.D. cognitive
neuroscience
[*][*][*] EUSABETH YOUNG humanities
[*] BRUEHL
PERSONAL
PREUDOMETER HISTORY OF NOTE
[*][*][*] Former true
[*][*] believer in PA
[*][*][*]
[*][*]
[*][*][*] Known for birth-
[*][*] order work, but
also wrote Freud:
Biologist of the
Mind.
[*][*][*] Head shrink at
Cornell Medical
College
[*][*][*]
[*][*][*] Yale professor;
[*] graduate of Western
New England Institute
for Psychoanalysis
[*][*][*] Has spent decades
studying biology
of memory in Aplysia,
a slug with big
nerves
[*][*][*] Teaches history of PA
[*] at Wesleyan; biographer
of Anna Freud; author
of Freud on Women
FREUDOMETER POINT OF VIEW
[*][*][*] PA utterly fails as a science. It doesn't begin to
[*][*] do justice to the intricacies of motivation. Freud
himself was "endlessly devious and
self-dramatizing."
[*][*][*] The era of psychoanalytic imperialism may be over,
[*][*] but neuroscience actually has a lot to learn from
PA
[*][*][*] A bad understanding of biology spawned a "bad
[*][*] psychology." The six cases Freud used to support
PA reflect not science but subjective
preconceptions.
[*][*][*] It doesn't matter whether or not Freud was right,
only that PA helps patients. It's not as effective
as drugs for depression, but it's great for
anxiety.
[*][*][*] The idea of "the story" and the idea of
"trauma"
have leaped the bounds of PA to become potent
forces in the culture at large.
[*][*][*] Considers Freud the great archeologist of the
[*] mind. Believes PA has become a victim of its own
success and of excessive expectations.
[*][*][*] All mental processes are biological, but PA
divorced psychiatry from concern with the brain as
organ of mental activity. Now it's time for
reconciliation.
[*][*][*] Freud was sexist; many ideas are simplistic; penis
[*] envy does not drive female development; but he
teaches us about oppressive patriarchal
prejudices.
FREUDOMETER IN THEIR OWN WORDS
[*][*][*] Freud reduced "everything to the sexual, the
[*][*] selfish, the infantile. His overdetermination of
psychic causality is the tool not of a scientist
but of an intellectual megalomaniac."
[*][*][*] "Neuroscientists need a model of the mind and
[*][*] psychoanalysis can provide it." "This is the
headiest time in psychoanalysis since the early
days of Freud's first discoveries."
[*][*][*] "Freud erected his psychoanalytic edifice on
[*][*] intellectual quicksand." He also taught
"his followers to replace the empirical attitude
with blind loyalty and ruthlessness toward
dissent."
[*][*][*] "The effectiveness of PA has not been fully
tested. And if it were, it would no doubt be fully
vindicated," even though "PA has become a
liability for psychiatry."
[*][*][*] "I suggest that PA, as theory or practice, might
well be rejuvenated by returning to the questions
of incest and kinship, as well as their
interrelation."
[*][*][*] Freud was the first to treat the unconscious "as
[*] a part of us that is at work all the time, which
contains material we can't stand thinking about
and then repress."
[*][*][*] "Psychoanalysts devalued experimental inquiry.
Consequently PA slid into intellectual decline
that has had a deleterious effect on
psychiatry."
[*][*][*] "The whole new feminist appropriation of Freud
Tags:
american journal of psychiatry,
cachet,
cognitive neuroscience,
cornell medical college,
eric r kandel,
frank j sulloway,
frederick crews,
freud wars,
gay history,
judith butler,
literature departments,
new york review of books,
peter gay,
psychoanalysis,
psychoanalytic theory,
robert michels,
true believer,
yale professor
