When was freud discredited

The greater the number of people who wanted that kind of therapy, the greater the demand for therapists, and the postwar decades were a boom time for psychiatry.

In , two-thirds of American psychiatrists worked in hospitals; in , seventeen per cent did. Twelve and a half per cent of American medical students chose psychiatry as a profession in , an all-time high. What is really going on are things that we are denying or repressing or sublimating or projecting onto the therapist by the mechanism of transference, and the goal of therapy is to bring those things to light.

Amazingly, Americans, a people stereotypically allergic to abstract systems, found this model of the mind irresistible. Many scholars have tried to explain why, and there are, no doubt, multiple reasons, but the explanation offered by the anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann is simple: alternative theories were worse. Freudian concepts were taken up by intellectuals, who wrote about cathexes, screen memories, and reaction formations, and they were absorbed into popular discourse.

People who had never read a word of Freud talked confidently about the superego, the Oedipus complex, and penis envy. Freud was recruited to the anti-utopian politics of the nineteen-fifties. Popular magazines equated Freud with Copernicus and Darwin. Claims were large. Professors in English departments naturally wondered how they might get in on the action.

They did not have much trouble finding a way. For it is not a stretch to treat literary texts in the same way that an analyst treats what a patient is saying. Academic critics are therefore always in the market for a theoretical apparatus that can give coherence and consistency to this enterprise, and Freudianism was ideally suited for the task.

Decoding and exposing are what psychoanalysis is all about. One professor excited about the possibilities was Frederick Crews. Crews received his Ph. The dissertation explained what Forster thought by looking at what Forster wrote.

It was plain-vanilla history-of-ideas criticism, and Crews found it boring. As an undergraduate, at Yale, he had fallen in love with Nietzsche, and Nietzsche had led him to Freud. Crews began teaching a popular graduate seminar on the subject.

He also got involved in the antiwar movement on campus, serving as a co-chair of the Faculty Peace Committee. Like many people at Berkeley in those days, he became radicalized, and he considered his interest in Freud to be part of his radicalism. Students would propose contradictory psychoanalytic readings, and they all sounded good, but it was just an ingenuity contest. There was no way to prove that one interpretation was truer than another. Psychoanalysis was beginning to look like a circular and self-justifying methodology.

The article was a review of several books by revisionists. Psychoanalysis had already been discredited as a medical science, Crews wrote; what researchers were now revealing was that Freud himself was possibly a charlatan—an opportunistic self-dramatizer who deliberately misrepresented the scientific bona fides of his theories.

People who send aggrieved letters to the Review often seem to have missed the fact that the Review always gives its writers the last word, and Crews availed himself of the privilege with relish and at length. He gave, on balance, better than he got. Crews had retired from teaching in , and is now an emeritus professor at Berkeley. Part of the decline had to do with social change. Psychoanalysis was also taking a hit within the medical community.

Studies suggesting that psychoanalysis had a low cure rate had been around for a while. But the realization that depression and anxiety can be regulated by medication made a mode of therapy whose treatment times reached into the hundreds of billable hours seem, at a minimum, inefficient, and, at worst, a scam. Managed-care companies and the insurance industry certainly drew that conclusion, and the third edition of the DSM , in , scrubbed out almost every trace of Freudianism.

Meanwhile, the image of Freud as a lonely pioneer began to erode as well. He had flown to Vienna after the Nazis arrived to urge Freud to flee. But the image originated with, and was cultivated by, Freud himself.

One corner of Anglo-American intellectual life where Freudianism had always been regarded with suspicion was the philosophy department.

A few philosophers, like Stanley Cavell, who had an interest in literature and Continental thinkers took Freud up. But to philosophers of science the knowledge claims of psychoanalysis were always dubious. Swales and other researchers were also able to show that Freud consistently misrepresented the outcomes of the treatments he based his theories on. 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.

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, usually egregiously, in all forty-three. In , a British researcher, E. Thornton suggested that Freud was often high on cocaine when he wrote his early scientific articles, which accounts for their sloppiness with the data and the recklessness of their claims. That year, in an interview with a Canadian philosophy professor, Todd Dufresne, Crews was asked whether he was ready to call it a day with Freud.

Crews seems to have grown worried that although Freud and Freudianism may look dead, we cannot be completely, utterly, a hundred per cent sure. The new book synthesizes fifty years of revisionist scholarship, repeating and amplifying the findings of other researchers fully acknowledged , and tacking on a few additional charges. Crews is an attractively uncluttered stylist, and he has an amazing story to tell, but his criticism of Freud is relentless to the point of monomania.

It ought to come with a bulb of garlic. This is, obviously, the reputation the Woolfs carried with them when they went to meet Freud in As Crews is right to believe, this Freud has long outlived psychoanalysis.

That persona helped Freud to evolve, in the popular imagination, from a scientist into a kind of poet of the mind. And the thing about poets is that they cannot be refuted. Freud and his concepts, now converted into metaphors, joined the legion of the undead. Is there anything new to say about this person? Additionally, in his later work he admitted to not understanding female sexuality The Washington Post, ; Zakin, Like all people, Freud had both positive and negative things to contribute to society.

While we often remember him in a negative light, I believe that it may be prudent to take into consideration the context of the time. Freud revolutionized the psychological field by positing that the memories, emotions, and ideas can exist in our mind without Aphasia is a disorder that occurs after brain damage to speech-related centers of the brain About episodes Articles ASk mayim.

Freud Developmental Theory. EDT Oct. Originally published on Live Science. Written and presented in a style that makes even the most complex subjects interesting and easy to understand, How It Works is enjoyed by readers of all ages. Live Science. View Deal. See all comments Given that the advertising industry leverages his theories as a foundation for all advertisement, and given that advertising works, I'd say: Yes, his theories are valid.

Watch the documentary "The Century of Self. I'd say that Freud was basically correct, though not in an all encompassing way. With credit to the Firesign Theater, "we are all just Bozo's on this Bus". So there. This is a typical example of the resistance to Freud that has beset psychoanalysis from the outset--and a rather weak attack at that.

A more interesting article would be how Freud was right about almost everything! Here are some of the examples of things Freud was right about: 1 Dreams--still the best theory out there disguised "wish fulfillment" 2 Fundamental and continued attraction to the first love object, usually the mother 3 Persistence of the infantile--e. The President and his followers. Or, if you like, a one word defense: note the frequent use of the common term for sex with the mother not even allowed to print it here, as well as the term for the woman's genitalia as opposed to the male's.

Freud was actually most interested in the unconscious, not the subconscious. Also, he did not actually say that we are all repressing desires to have sex with our parents.