- Position‹5 of 5
- Everything we know is questionable
- Argument1 of 2›
Freud didn’t invent psychoanalysis
Freud is not the true father of psychoanalysis; it was invented by Joseph Breuer.
The argument
The origin of Freud's early work with psychoanalysis can be linked to Joseph Breuer. Breuer became famous after treating a young woman diagnosed with what was called female hysteria, Anna O, with kindness and allowing her to talk. The method credited to Freud was therefore already in use before he took it up: the substance of it — a patient permitted to speak at length and listened to seriously — belonged to Breuer's practice rather than to a discovery of Freud's own. He said his patients all reported being sexually abused or had fantasised about it. Freud's said he had uncovered 'unconscious' memories of early childhood sexual abuse for every single one of his patients from the mid-1890s, who all showed the symptoms of 'hysteria' and obsessional neurosis derived from infancy. The universality of that claim is what invites scrutiny. A finding that holds without exception across an entire caseload is unusual in clinical work, and it is the kind of result that a method capable of generating the same answer regardless of the patient would also produce. However, a close reading of his papers and letters from this period indicates this was untrue – instead, he analytically inferred the supposed incidents by a procedure heavily dependent on the symbolic (subjective) interpretation of somatic symptoms. On this account the memories were not recovered from patients but derived by the analyst, from physical symptoms read as symbols, which means the uniformity across cases reflects the procedure rather than the patients. Taken together the two points undercut the standard account in different ways: the technique was inherited rather than invented, and the findings said to vindicate it were arrived at by inference rather than discovered in the patients. Because Freud didn't invent psychoanalysis, what we think we know about his theories is questionable.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Freud did actually credit Breuer with the discovery of the psychoanalytical method.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] This does not decrease Freud's achievements.