His own baggage

The argument

Proponents of this position argue that Freud's beliefs cannot be assessed apart from the life of the man who formed them, and that Freud was himself a troubled soul. Letters are said to suggest that his sister-in-law was his mistress for many years and that he also had an affair with a male friend. In his 40s, on the account given, he "had numerous psychosomatic disorders as well as exaggerated fears of dying and other phobias". Supporters treat this as relevant evidence rather than gossip: a thinker whose own inner life was marked by disorder, dread and concealment was, on this view, an unreliable instrument for pronouncing on the inner lives of others. The physical record is offered in the same spirit. Freud was an avid drug user and a cocaine addict, and a lifelong smoker who refused to stop even after losing part of his jaw to a relentless malignancy. He underwent more than 30 surgeries, and at the end requested and received euthanasia from his physician. Proponents read this sequence as a pattern of compulsion persisted in against plain evidence of harm, and as a sign that the self-knowledge his standing presupposed was not in fact available to him. Taken together, supporters conclude, the baggage Freud carried is not incidental to his authority but corrosive of it. A body of belief advanced as insight into the mind was, on this account, produced by a man whose own conduct and afflictions were governed by forces he could not manage, which is why they regard those beliefs as problematic. The personal claims here rest on inference from correspondence and on secondary characterisation rather than on direct testimony.

Premises

Counter-arguments

This is an ad hominem: Freud's affairs, his drug use, his phobias and his final illness are facts about the man, and they are logically independent of whether his theories are sound. A body of ideas stands or falls on its evidence, internal coherence and explanatory power, not on the character or health of the person who advanced it — Newton's obsessive alchemy and occult theology did not make his mechanics false, and a saintly author guarantees no theory's truth. If psychoanalysis is problematic, as many argue it is, the reasons lie in its testability, its reliance on unfalsifiable interpretation and its weak evidential base — grounds internal to the theory itself — not in Freud's cocaine habit or his jaw cancer. Listing his personal troubles may colour a reader's impression of him, but it supplies no reason to doubt any particular claim of psychoanalytic theory; the position it is meant to support concerns the beliefs, and the biography does not touch them. Judging the work by the flaws of its author confuses the two.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] A person's affairs or troubled private life are logically independent of whether their theories are true; inferring the flaws of the work from the flaws of the author is an ad hominem. [Rejecting P3] Addiction, smoking and illness bear on Freud's biography, not on the evidential merits of psychoanalysis — Newton's occult obsessions did not invalidate his physics.