- Position‹2 of 5›
- Freud's beliefs were problematic
[P1] Freud believed repressed traumatic memories could be recovered.
The argument
'Recovered memories' of alleged childhood sexual abuse by their parents have led to parents accused and whole families divided or destroyed. The backlash has let abusers escape punishment.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Newman argues that hidden traumas have a great influence in an individual's "Pschological functioning despite not being recalled or available to consciousness". Freud's theories have consequently "Shaped much of our current thinking about symptoms and the need to understand what lies behind them", counter arguing the idea that Freud's ideology of recovered memories causes more harm, when in actual fact it enables individuals to fully recover from their trauma.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The lineage is looser than stated. Recovered-memory therapy developed decades later and in a form its supposed originator did not endorse — he moved away from the seduction theory — so attributing the practice to his framework skips a long intervening history of other influences. [Rejecting P2] The harms to accused families are documented; the second half of the premise is asserted. That the backlash let real abusers escape punishment is a claim about outcomes the argument does not evidence, and the same period saw substantial increases in the reporting and prosecution of abuse. [Rejecting C] The consequences of a later clinical practice are weak grounds for a verdict on a body of theory. Judged this way most influential frameworks would be condemned by what practitioners later did with them, and the argument never engages the parts of the work — the unconscious, defence, transference — that shaped clinical thinking independently of it.