I’m sort of surprised that you dismiss the work of Freud as mere quackery in your recent column about B.F. Skinner. No doubt Freud’s theories and the therapeutic effectiveness of psychoanalysis remain open and controversial issues. But accusing the father of psychoanalysis and one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century of quackery is simply “Freud-bashing” and serves no purpose.
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Freud has always had his detractors, but the public didn’t hear much about them until the Masson controversy of the early 1980s. Jeffrey Masson was a trained analyst and researcher who briefly served as projects director for the Freud archive. Making use of previously unavailable documents, he argued in the 1984 book The Assault on Truth that a fundamental tenet of psychoanalysis, the repression of infantile sexuality, was based on a lie. Freud initially believed that adult neurosis was a manifestation of sexual abuse in early childhood but later rejected this “seduction theory” as implausible. Instead he proposed his now-familiar ideas about oedipal fantasy, which located most early sexual escapades in the patient’s imagination. Masson called that a cop-out, claiming Freud had been right the first time but lacked the guts to confront the reality (and ubiquity) of sexual abuse. Either by coincidence or as an outgrowth of this notion, the years following publication of Masson’s book saw a vogue for “recovered memory therapy,” in which practitioners elicited horrifying tales of incest, rape, and satanic ritual abuse from their patients–all of which were supposedly bona fide recollections.
In 1993 Frederick Crews, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, entered the fray. In a series of scathing articles he argued, in effect, that Freud and Masson were both full of it. Freud’s patients, Crews said, seldom reported sexual abuse spontaneously. Instead the therapist–whom Crews characterized as megalomaniacal–used a combination of suggestion and browbeating to plant ideas in their heads that would fit his preconceived views. Modern reports of ritual sexual abuse, etc, were the result of a similar process and likewise bogus; suggestible souls were just telling therapists what they wanted to hear. The articles caused an uproar–you can read all about it in two books, The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute (1995) and Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend (1998).
