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October 29, 1998

ADOLF GRUNBAUM

The long-awaited exhibition, "Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture," finally opened at the Library of Congress on Oct. 15.

The exhibit, the largest ever assembled on the life and work of the father of psychoanalysis, features personal papers, rare books, photos and silent movies of Freud and his circle, plus such totemistic objects as Freud's spectacles, the chair he used in his examining room and the rug he draped over his famous couch.

The exhibition had been scheduled to open in 1996 but was delayed by a budget shortfall and a petition by 50 Freud doubters who protested that the exhibition, as originally planned, ignored decades of revisionist criticism of Freud's legacy and reputation.

Petitioners included Freud's own granddaughter and some big names in popular culture, including feminist Gloria Steinem and physician-writer Oliver Sacks. But no petitioner carried more clout in the world of Freud criticism than Pitt's Adolf Grünbaum, Andrew Mellon Professor of Philosophy, research professor of psychiatry and chairperson of the University's Center for Philosophy of Science.

In his two books on psychoanalysis, "The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique" (1984) and "Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis: A Study in the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis" (1993), Grünbaum called attention to central weaknesses in psychoanalytic theory. He argued that Freud's clinical data were fatally contaminated by suggestion, and he challenged psychoanalysts to come up with scientifically reliable evidence for the master's theories. Paul Meehl, widely regarded as one of America's foremost living psychologists, and a psychoanalyst for 40 years, wrote that psychoanalysis will be "slowly but surely abandoned, both as a mode of helping and as a theory of the mind," if psychoanalysts fail to refute Grünbaum's criticisms.

The 1996 petition against the Library of Congress exhibition set off an acrimonious, widely publicized debate, with politicians and syndicated pundits taking sides. Petitioners accused exhibit planners of scientific ignorance and pro-Freudian propagandizing. Defenders of the exhibition accused petitioners of attempted censorship and even anti-Semitism. The latter accusation particularly offended Grünbaum, who is (as was Freud) an atheist of Jewish descent who fled the Holocaust.

Further complicating the debate for Grünbaum was the fact that the exhibition's curator, Michael Roth, is his former son-in-law.

Ultimately, "Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture" was expanded — slightly and grudgingly, critics say — to include samples of anti-Freudian scholarship. Two revisionist essays, one written by Grünbaum, were included in the companion book for the exhibit.

Grünbaum (who has not yet visited the Library of Congress exhibit) talked recently with University Times Assistant Editor Bruce Steele about the exhibit controversy and the current state of psychoanalysis.

UNIVERSITY TIMES:

You've been quoted in various news media — Reuters, Newsweek and the Washington Post, among others — as denying that the petition you signed in 1996 represented an attempt at censorship. What were you hoping to achieve?

GRUNBAUM:

I should emphasize that the 50 signatories from all over the world represented an enormous range of views on psychoanalysis. The petition asked only the following: that the exhibit should portray the present state of knowledge and adequately reflect the full spectrum of informed opinion about the status of Freud's contribution to modern intellectual history.

The point of the petition was to enlarge the exhibit, not to censor it in any way. It was a case of deliberate misrepresentation in the press by pro-Freudians to say that we were out to censor the exhibit or shut it down.

Of course, some people had a vested interest in leaving out criticism. Harold Blum, the director of the Freud Archives, announced at the 1995 meeting of the International Psychoanalytic Association in San Francisco that the Library of Congress exhibit, which was expected to be visited by a quarter of a million people, would give an enormous shot in the arm to psychoanalytic therapy and that Freud's picture would hang in the rotunda of the Library of Congress along with those of the presidents. He depicted this as a tremendous opportunity for improving the dire straits in which psychoanalytic practitioners for the most part find themselves, due mainly to a rapid decline in their patient population.

Based on the companion book that includes your essay, and what you've heard about the exhibit, how well did you succeed in enlarging the presentation on Freud? As far as the companion volume is concerned, only two critics were included, belatedly. That was done, as curator Michael Roth said publicly, in response to the petition. He said that originally he didn't have the notion that criticism of Freud as such should have a place in the exhibit.

As to the representation [of anti-Freud criticism] beyond the companion volume, there are quotes on the walls of various alcoves in the exhibit, I'm told, which represent different views of Freud — some very favorable, and some, like Nabokov's views, extremely unfavorable, if not derisive. So, in that limited sense, there is indeed representation of criticism.

There was to have been, according to Michael Roth, a section of the exhibit featuring books critical of Freud and related materials, but then it was decided to omit that in favor of material on the Holocaust and its bearing on Freud's life and the deaths in Auschwitz of a number of his sisters, and of course his expulsion from Vienna, where the Gestapo was about to arrest him. I think it's quite appropriate that an exhibit like this include major episodes in Freud's life, and this was certainly a major episode.

One of the stated aims of the exhibit is to document the enormous cultural impact Freud has had in this century, not only in psychology and psychiatry but also in literature, art, religion, theatre, anthropology, film, you name it. In the last couple of years, psychoanalysis has figured in the movie "Good Will Hunting" and at least one episode of the "The Simpsons." And, of course, the Clinton-Lewinsky affair has prompted people to quote Freud's famous line about a cigar sometimes just being a cigar. How do you explain Freud's high profile?

That's a very hard question. I don't know whether people really have good answers — that is, answers that can be well-supported by evidence. One of the possible explanations is that in a culture that has been enormously hypocritical about sex — central Europe, America and so on — people welcomed somebody who gave almost pride of place to sex, along with aggression, as a major motivator of human thought, feeling, conduct and psychological disturbances.

Psychoanalysis was very ambitious; it dealt with a great variety of phenomena. That is a source of appeal when you have a single collection of theories that are interrelated, though distinct, that deal with a great variety of phenomena and are perceived as a liberating gospel. People felt that it allowed them to be more honest about their sexuality. Although Freud treated homosexuality as a perversion, he was not censorious about it. So even homosexuals could take some comfort from his account.

With respect to literature, I think it's much easier to understand the appeal. Freud himself said of his case histories that they read like stories and don't have the stamp of science on them. That's his wording. And literary people, of course, are interested in stories. He was an excellent writer and narrator. The one prize that he got was awarded in Germany, the Goethe Prize, and it was for writing. He didn't get a prize for science. And the material, of course, dealt with the human condition and with particular people who had psychic afflictions, with whom a great many people can identify.

That suggests how Freud initially became popular. How do you explain his continuing popularity? It depends on how this is measured. If one talks about people in movies — Woody Allen, for instance, who just talks about psychoanalysis constantly, which I personally find boring — then Freud's influence remains strong. But the extent to which psychoanalysis is still influential in the intellectual world cannot be measured by what movie scriptwriters produce, because they hark back to an earlier period of the influence of Freudianism.

It seems to me likely that after a while, the substantial decrease in patients going to psychoanalysts, the great increase in rival therapies — also, the rise of psycho-pharmacology and then the basic decline of psychoanalytic theory in leading departments of psychiatry — those developments are going to filter through to the general public. People with emotional problems aren't going to go to psychoanalysts. That's not feasible for most people anyhow, for financial reasons. So if one talks about Freud's enormous influence, one has to be careful to specify in what segments of the culture this is the case.

How well understood do you think psychoanalysis really is, outside the psychological community? Much of what passes for Freudianism consists of vague, vulgarized versions of it. One example is the notion of so-called Freudian slips. Freud himself points out that the purview of his theory of slips is very much narrower than that of slips in general, which have been understood as long as Western civilization has been flourishing. That is, people have laughed when other people misspoke themselves in certain ways because they knew what the motive was. An example is the case of a man at a party where it's very warm, who needs a breath of fresh air, but who encounters a woman wearing a low-cut dress. He says, "Pardon me, I need to get a breast of flesh air." Now, that's not a Freudian slip, even though it has to do with sex, because the motive is obvious rather than unconscious. Freud disavowed credit for explaining these sorts of slips.

A true Freudian slip — and the question of whether there are genuine Freudian slips is unresolved — is a slip of such a nature that both the person who commits it and bystanders would attribute the slip to some mechanical failure, whereas it is actually caused by an unconscious psychological motive. The novelty of Freud's theory is to claim that unconscious motives are the actual causes of slips that otherwise seem psychologically unmotivated. Very often, he pointed to repressed motives as being the presumed causes and that, I think, is very questionable because the method he used to establish them, the so-called method of free association, is in my view riddled with epistemological difficulties.

Paul Robinson of Stanford University, a pro-Freudian intellectual historian, wrote several years ago that you have consigned "the entire Freudian theory of psychopathology, dream production and slips to a scientific limbo, devoid of any demonstrated basis in sound evidence." Is that a fair assessment? Well, it's an overstatement, and it has a sensationalized component. I myself would not have spent a good many years writing about psychoanalysis if I thought that it was just a dead horse. I'm not in the business of flogging dead horses.

I think that some of the defense mechanisms that psychoanalysis has hypothesized are, in my view, genuine. Reaction-formation, for example, which is a mechanism whereby a person who has a certain socially unacceptable feeling converts that feeling into its opposite. For example, a person who is immensely hostile does not want to face this hostility, so he or she banishes it from consciousness and exhibits behavior that is just the opposite: courtesy, friendliness, even affectionate behavior. But the consciously banished hostility crops up in other ways in overt behavior. I've seen clear cases of this in many people, and I think there's good evidence for reaction-formation.

And then there's the idea of denial, not wanting to face up to unpleasant truths and so, acting as if they aren't so. People who are fatally ill do that sometimes. And projection, or imputing to someone else the attitudes, feelings and motives that the projector feels. That is certainly an insightful notion, though it is hardly original with Freud. Shakespeare knew of it.

Of course, the principal defense mechanism Freud talked about is repression. There, we have to be careful to distinguish two things. One is, whether repression as such exists in the full-blooded Freudian sense, which means banishing something from consciousness to the point that no ordinary process will bring it back, and the special technique of free association is required to retrieve these repressed ideas. The next question is whether repression, if it exists, has all of the effects that Freud attributed to it, namely, that repression was a crucial, causal requirement for the production of neuroses and psychoses and that infantile repressions — repressions of thoughts during infancy — are necessary for the production of dreams and, furthermore, that they are the essential causes for certain classes of slips.

One of Freud's classic cases of a slip involved a young man who omitted a Latin word from a quotation from Virgil. Freud attributed that slip to the young man's worry that his girlfriend might be pregnant. This Freud did by latching on to the omitted word, aliquis, meaning "someone," which contains the syllable "liquis" — liquid, which Freud related to menstrual flow. This is a typical case of Freudian theorizing. I don't think there is any convincing evidence that the young man forgot the word because of his fear of pregnancy. It's been pointed out that the Latin word, exoriar, which means "emerge" and which also is part of that quote from Virgil and which could refer to birth, was not omitted by the young man.

To return to Robinson: As he well knew, I am a great admirer of Freud's psychological theory of religious belief, which partly goes back to an earlier theory which begins with the fact that people, while they were children, believed their parents had the power to protect them from all threats in life. Well, very soon children are told by their parents, "Now you're on your own." The helplessness they then feel leads some to project onto the cosmos a super-parent, God the Father. And in a culture where men are supposed to be the dominant protectors — although mothers certainly have an enormous share in raising children — the projection is that an omnipotent, cosmic father would be the protector. That seems to me an extremely perceptive psychological insight. Yet, the psychology of religious belief does not settle the question of the validity of such belief! What do you think of the argument that psychoanalysis should be grouped, like history, among the humanities? That psychoanalysis shouldn't be judged by the standards of the natural sciences? Freud shouted from the rooftops that psychoanalysis is a science like any other. "What else can it be?" he asked. Now, there are certain philosophers, who call themselves hermeneutic philosophers, who say that Freud misunderstood his own enterprise, a rather patronizing judgment, and that he was guilty of what they call a "scientistic self-misunderstanding." Scientism is a derogatory term that stands for a kind of intellectually imperialistic, utopian view of the capabilities of science. They say that Freud, having been a product of his time, thought he was developing a scientific theory but in fact was not, that he was developing an interpretive theory of "meanings." The subject matter of psychoanalysis is human mentation and conduct, so the materials are different from those of physics and chemistry, but not so different from the domain of cognitive psychologists. Cognitive psychologists talk about unconscious processes, not in the sense of Freud's so-called dynamic unconscious but in the cognitive sense. For example, if I ask you the name of Napoleon's first wife and you answer, "Josephine," and then I say, "Your life depends on telling me how you retrieved that name," what would you say? You can't do it, because it's a completely unconscious process. It's not repressed, it's just unconscious.

To say that Freudian theory should be viewed as a humanity is very problematic because the question then is: Does it illuminate the human condition, in a well-founded way? Shakespeare was magnificently insightful about the human condition and our motivations. Freud credits him and other writers for having had some of the ideas that Freud later systematically put together. If literary people don't ask whether Freud provided genuine insights or only ill-founded pseudo-insights, then the claim that it's humanistically enlightening to use psychoanalytic ideas and theories in the description of the human condition just hangs in the air.

A number of critics of Freud, including the Nazis, have referred to psychoanalysis as "the Jewish science." Sometimes, defenders of Freud portray anti-Freudians as being anti-Semitic.

I think that's a paranoid evasion. First of all, when you discuss a theory you have to see what arguments are offered for and against it. You don't first turn to whether or not people have certain psychological attitudes toward the theory. Yet — and I've written a paper on this — the dislike of a theory can uncover previously unknown defects in the theory, which are objective defects. Being predisposed to like a theory can uncover previously unrecognized supporting evidence for it.

The psychologist who organized a counter-petition to our petition to the Library of Congress, Elisabeth Roudinesko, gave a course on Freud-hatred at the University of Paris, in which she lumped the petitioners together with the Nazis and the Bolsheviks as all being motivated by Freud-hatred. That charge is simplistic and irrelevant.

The use of Freudian analysis has been declining for, what, 30 years? It depends on the geographic region you're talking about. The spread of psychoanalysis as a therapy was much slower in Europe than it was in the United States, where during the 1950s it became a new secular panacea. In this country, the major chairs in psychiatry departments were occupied by Freudians in the 1950s and early 1960s. Very often, they enforced their orthodoxy on young faculty. When our own [outgoing senior vice chancellor for the Health Sciences] Thomas Detre came from Europe to Yale, people told him that if he wanted to be promoted, he'd better not be so critical of psychoanalysis. Now, Tom Detre isn't the sort of person who will be muzzled in the interest of careerism, and he didn't hew to the line. He got promoted anyhow because of his other virtues, but other people left America to study psychiatry in other countries.

To my knowledge, no leading psychiatry department still has a psychoanalyst as chairman. There has been a considerable decline of the influence of Freudian theory in both psychiatry and general psychology. Of course, there has also been an ongoing shrinkage in the number of people who seek psychoanalytic treatment. It is true that a great many of the older clinical psychologists and psychiatrists still give what they call psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy. To that extent, it is still being practiced. But that, too, is declining.

Going back to the charge that psychoanalysis is a Jewish science, people like the novelist Gore Vidal have said that Freudian theorizing is not appealing to people who are not influenced by Judaic thinking. Something silly like that. It's also been said that one reason there are so many Jewish psychoanalysts is that, given the history of the Jews being persecuted and being expelled from certain countries, they have become more conscious of human motivations and more interested in them than many other people. There is also, in proportion to the general population, a rather impressive percentage of great writers who are Irish, presumably because of hard times in Ireland.

Can Freudian therapy survive in an era of managed care and Prozac? About 15 years ago, the then-head of the National Institute of Mental Health said that a therapy that's going to be deserving of reimbursement has to undergo the same kind of testing for clinical effectiveness as any other therapy. This gave insurance companies a great argument to invoke against reimbursement for long-term psychoanalytic treatment. They were able to claim that since no such controlled studies of Freudian treatment were available, they could decline reimbursement.

Not long after my first book [criticizing psychoanalysis] came out in 1984, there were several sessions at the World Congress of Psychoanalysts in Montreal in which it was suggested that insurance companies could invoke my book to refuse reimbursement for psychoanalytic therapy. But there was little in the book to make that case. In fact, in an interview in The New York Times of Jan. 15, 1985, I stated that I never tell people not to undergo psychoanalytic treatment if they wish.

With respect to the HMOs that decline reimbursement for perfectly legitimate cases — that's an increasing problem and I hope eventually there will be a revolt against the whole system of primary care physicians being financially rewarded for non-referrals.

The problem for psychoanalytic treatment is simply this: It's not been shown to be cost-effective as compared to rival therapies. It's very expensive. Only very well-to-do people can afford it. That was always the case. It was perfectly clear that only a tiny minority of people who need help and seek it could be accommodated by long-term psychoanalysis. So, it had fallen on hard times in this country before the HMOs came into the picture to any significant extent.

Preliminary research suggests that talk therapy may physically alter brain chemistry in ways similar to antidepressant drugs, and therefore psychotherapy works by producing beneficial changes in patients suffering from conditions like depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Does that suggest that Freudian psychoanalysis may be useful after all? No, because the leap is too quick. It may be that talk therapy changes things in the brain. It still remains to be shown whether psychoanalytic therapy accomplishes its goal via these newly detected brain changes. That can be observed phenomenologically in controlled studies. The answer doesn't require the devious route through brain alterations. There, the record has been fairly clear: There just is no cogent evidence that psychoanalysis is cost-effective. The suspicion is that the common factor that's involved in helpful talk therapies is supportiveness of one sort or another, the ability of people to verbalize their problems to a sympathetic listener who mobilizes their hopes. It is known that the mobilization of hope secretes endorphins, which are endogenous opiates; interferon, which counteracts infections, and other substances. Prayer may do the same for believers.

If you could have dinner with Freud, what would you ask him? I would offer him my central objections to his claim that the method of free association can demonstrate the causation of neuroses and psychoses, that it can fathom the causation of dream production by unconscious wishes, and that it can reliably explain slips on the basis of opaque motives. I would also ask him for cogent evidence for his theory of psychosexual development, all of those speculations about the differences in the sexes, that women deep-down see themselves as failed boys because they have penis envy.

How do you think Freud would reply? He was, of course, a magnificent rhetorician. What he did with objections, very often, was to mention them initially in a very hospitable way, but then brush them off. Many people then think he's dealt with them effectively when in fact he hasn't. I'll give an example. Early on, Freud concluded that it's a universal tendency to forget the unpleasant. Later, he agreed that we know of many very painful experiences that are remembered for life such that, even if you want to forget them, you can't. He mentions his own recollection of relieving himself in a potty in his parents' bedroom when he was a boy. His father reprimanded him and told him he would never amount to anything. All his life, Freud dreamt about that incident and recognized that when his ambition was intense, he was trying to prove his father wrong.

Now, how did he explain these clear counter-examples? Did he ask himself what the difference is in the determining conditions between those cases in which we forget or repress and the conditions under which we remember? No, he didn't do that. Instead, he invented another instinct — namely, an opposing tendency to the tendency to forget. Then he said, the tendency to forget doesn't always carry through, it doesn't always succeed. Well, that's a sloppy evasive gambit for a man who professed to believe that there are specific causes for every psychic happening. Then he simply forgot about that supposed opposed tendency after all, and went ahead with the idea that the repression of painful thoughts is a universal tendency. This is a typical Freudian maneuver in dealing with criticism. I wouldn't be surprised if he tried something like that, were he alive today, in responding to the many objections that have been leveled against his theories.

Would he get away with that, with you? No (laughing). Oh, no.

Filed under: Feature,Volume 31 Issue 5

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