- Position‹5 of 5
- Everything we know is questionable
- Argument‹2 of 2
Freud’s theories did not come from his work as a therapist
Freud's work as a therapist did not actually follow or support his own theories.
The argument
Freud consistently misrepresented the outcomes of the treatments he based his theories on. This matters because of the authority those theories were given: they were presented as findings drawn from clinical practice, so that the practice was meant to be the evidence. If the reports of the treatments do not match what happened in them, the evidence has been removed while the conclusions remain. In the case of one of the only patients whose treatment notes Freud did not destroy, Ernst Lanzer — the Rat Man — it is clear that he misrepresented the facts as well. The circumstance is doubly telling. The comparison was only possible because notes survived, and they survived only because they escaped a destruction that removed the same check everywhere else, leaving the published accounts of nearly all the other cases unverifiable in principle. In a study of the forty-three treatments about which some information survives, it turned out that Freud had broken his own rules for how to conduct an analysis in all forty-three. The figure is what makes the charge structural rather than anecdotal: not a lapse in a difficult case, but a uniform gap between the method described and the method practised, in every instance where the practice can still be examined. Views on dreams and oedipal came from him analysing his own dreams rather than any empirical evidence. On this account the theories did not emerge from the consulting room at all; the consulting room was where they were subsequently illustrated. "I think that most of us have only a vague - perhaps defensively vague - sense of what Freud is really saying, not least because in the field of popular culture his work has often been mediated to us in ways that water it down, make it palatable, reduce its insight (and) complexity."
Premises
Counter-arguments
The reason for Freud's success was that other theories were worse. Most importantly, psychoanalysis helped move the treatment of mental illness from the asylum and the hospital to the office.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Freud's theories were still relevant to the advancement of psychology as a discipline.
Further reading
Crew, F. (2017) Freud: The Making of an Illusion. New York: Metropolitan