Ни о какой безапелляционности в моих высказываниях не может быть и речи!

As an addition to the body of knowledge, psychoanalysis is nugatory. The philosophers of science are divided as to whether it is unfalsifiable and unscientific (Popper) or falsifiable and falsified (Grünbaum). The Lamarckian bits --- and with them, the theories of the origin of family, society and religion --- simply have to go, and that the death instinct ever got a hearing from people supposedly benefitting from the Darwinian enlightenment is --- instructive. The central concepts of repression, and the recovery of repressed memories from infancy, are neurologically dubious, if not flatly contradictory to what is known about the physical basis of memory and the development of the brain; the theory of dreams is no better supported by our actual knowledge of the dreaming brain. In anthropology, Malinowski's demonstration that the Oedipus complex was not to be found in the Trobriands must now surely be classical. A philologist (Nietzsche would have appreciated this) has cut the theory of slips and errors to ribbons with Occam's Razor and textual criticism. Psychoanalysis has contributed nothing to the solution of the really basic, puzzling aspects of the mind --- how we remember; how we think; how we can represent the world; how we can hold intentions and act on them; etc., etc. --- indeed it just assumes that the unconscious can do them too.

Clinically, researchers dispute whether or not psychoanalysis is slightly less effective than other sorts of therapy; it is certainly not noticeably more effective, and equally certainly more costly, time consuming and intrusive than any of its rivals.

EVALUATION OF FREUD'S THEORY

Criticisms

It should come as no surprise that a theory as broad as Freud’s, and one that touched so many aspects of human existence, would receive severe criticism. The common criticisms of Freud and his theory include the following:

• Method of data collection. Freud used his own observations of his own patients as his source of data. There was no controlled experimentation. Not only did his patients not represent the general population, but his own needs and expectations probably influenced his observations.
  
• Definition of terms. Freud’s theory became popular at a time when psychology was preoccupied with operational definitions, and many, if not most, of Freud’s concepts were too nebulous to be measured. For example, how does one quantify psychic energy, castration anxiety, penis envy, or the Oedipal complex? How does one determine whether the interpretation of the latent symbols of a dream is valid? Science demands measurement, and many of Freud’s concepts were not and are not measurable.
  
• Dogmatism. As we have seen, Freud saw himself as the founder and leader of the psychoanalytic
  movement, and he would tolerate no ideas that conflicted with his own. If a member of his group insisted on disagreeing with him, Freud expelled that member from the group.
  
• Overemphasis on sex. The main reason many of Freud’s early colleagues eventually went their own way was that they believed Freud overemphasized sex as a motive for human behavior. Some thought that to see sexual motivation everywhere, as Freud did, was extreme and unnecessary. The personality theories that other psychoanalytically oriented theorists developed show that human behavior can be explained just as well, if not better, employing motives other than sexual ones.
  
• The self-fulfilling prophecy. Any theorist, not just Freud, can be criticized for being susceptible to self-fulfilling prophecy. The point is that Freud may have found what he was looking for simply because he was looking for it. For example, free association is not really free. Rather, it is guided, at least in part, by the analyst’s comments and gestures. Furthermore, once apatient is “trained,” he or she may begin to tell the analyst exactly what the analyst wants to hear. This criticism also applies to dream interpretation.
  
  
• Length, cost, and limited effectiveness of psychoanalysis. Because psychoanalysis usually takes years to complete, it is not available to most troubled people. Only the most affluent can participate. Furthermore, only reasonably intelligent and mildly neurotic people can benefit from psychoanalysis because patients must be able to articulate their inner experiences and understand the analyst’s interpretation of those experiences. Psychoanalysis is not effective with psychotic patients.
  
• Lack of falsifiability. In Chapter 1, we saw that Karl Popper said Freud’s theory was unscientific because it violated the principle of falsification. According to Popper, for a theory to be scientific, it must specify observations that, if made, would refute the theory. Unless such observations can be specified, the theory is unscientific. Popper claimed that because Freudian theory could account for anything a person did, nothing that a person could do would be contrary to what the theory predicted. Let us say, for example, that according to Freudian theory a certain cluster of childhood experiences will make an adult leery of heterosexual relationships. Instead, we find an adult who has had those experiences seeking and apparently enjoying such relationships. The Freudian can simply say that the person is demonstrating a reaction formation. Thus, no matter what happens, the theory is supported. A related criticism is that psychoanalysts engage in postdiction rather than prediction. That is, they attempt to explain events after they have occurred rather than predict what events will occur. The former is clearly easier than the
  latter. Stanovich (2004) says, "Adherents of psychoanalytic theory spend much time and effort in getting the theory to explain every known event, from indi-vidual quirks of behavior to large-scale social phenomena, but their success in making the theory a rich source of after-the-fact explanation robs it of any scientific
  utility. (p. 26)"

Contributions

Despite the criticisms, many believe that Freud made truly exceptional contributions to psychology. The following are usually listed among them:

• Expansion of psychology’s domain. Like no one before him, Freud pointed to the importance of studying the relationships among unconscious motivation, infantile sexuality, dreams, and anxiety. Freud’s was the first comprehensive theory of personality, and every personality theory since his can be seen as a reaction to his theory or to some aspect of it.
  
• Psychoanalysis. Freud created a new way of dealing with age-old mental disorders. Many still believe that psychoanalysis is the best way to understand and treat neuroses.
  
• Understanding of normal behavior. Freud not only provided a means of better understanding much abnormal behavior but also made much normal behavior comprehensible. Dreams, forgetfulness, mistakes, choice of mates, humor, and use of the ego defense mechanisms characterize everyone’s life, and Freud’s analysis of them makes them less mysterious for everyone.
  
• Generalization of psychology to other fields. By showing psychology’s usefulness in explaining phenomena in everyday life—religion, sports, politics, art, literature, and philosophy—Freud expanded psychology’s relevance to almost every sector of human existence.
  

To his contemporaries, there was something entirely unscientific about his very manner of discourse but, to posterity, it was precisely this manner that attracted attention, loyalty, and even devotion. Freud often thought of World War I as a kind of laboratory in which his central claims received macabre validation. In certain aspects, it was this war that gave a morbid cogency to Freudian theory among startled and saddened intellectuals. What is clear, however, is that the chilly reception his ideas suffered initially is not to be explained in terms of Victorian proprieties. Sexuality had been part of the clinical literature for decades by the time Freud made it a fixture in his writings. Anthropologists, at least since late in the eighteenth century, had reported on various primitive lusts and taboos, and had noted the centrality of sexual symbolism in many cultures. And the theory of uncon scious motivation, with its ancient and even biblical roots, had already received refinements from Charcot and Janet before Freud had begun to assemble a theory. Freud's main problem-and here we must demystify that portrait of Gothic struggle painted by his friends and friendly biographers-was that his way of thinking was perceived as anachronistic. This not only accounts for the early disregard paid to his works, but to his own life-long attempt to confer scientific respectability on them. The scientific community had learned to live without the Absolute, without metaphysics, and without those cosmic integrations of an earlier age at just about the time Freud's psychoanalytic ruminations were published. Psychology particularly was earnestly seeking its place in science and so was especially embarrassed by a theory in which the ratio of facts to assumptions was so small.