HERE IS A MAN who mesmerized the world. The mark of Freud’s theory is evident in high art, popular culture, and daily psychology. For the better part of a century, psychoanalysis dominated psychiatry as well, providing the leading theory of mind and the preferred means of treatment. Freud’s influence could hardly have been greater. An outsider from the provinces, Freud had fulfilled his most ambitious aspirations.
How remarkable that achievement now seems! Freud’s flaws were apparent. His Viennese colleagues saw his overreaching on display repeatedly. The beginnings of a walk sufficed for William James to take Freud’s measure. Virtually every argument advanced in recent years against Freud’s expansive claims and his methods of proof was also made by his contemporaries.
Some of Freud’s success must be attributed to his qualities as a man. He might have been obsessive and judgmental—by his own account not readily liked by others. But he was also vigorous and brilliant, with an astonishing range of reference and an appreciation for humor. He was cultivated, with refined tastes. As a writer and a lecturer, he was a gifted stylist. No one could match his skill at applying his own premises. Proud, combative, and vindictive, Freud created rivals as readily as followers. But throughout his life, and increasingly in his later years, Freud attracted admiration and loyalty. He was a force of nature.
Influence at Freud’s level must go beyond the personal. Freud’s claims and theories met many needs. On the Continent as in the States, mental illness was widespread. Rapid progress was the norm elsewhere in medicine. In appearance at least, Freud’s case reports and discoveries were part of a scientific renaissance that offered hope to the suffering.
The lessons Freud taught were highly palatable. Repeatedly, he complained that society resisted his news of infantile sexuality, the Oedipus complex, and the dominance of irrational forces in the mind. In practice, Freud echoed advanced opinion, the truths of theater, literature, and the coffeehouse. Sexual frankness, attacks on the hypocrisies of institutions from church to family, a laying bare of the hidden motivations apparent in the details of behavior—for the Viennese elite, familiar with the plays of Arthur Schnitzler and the fiction and journalism of the Young Vienna group, these approaches were welcome. Freud gave medical form to the leading prejudices of fin de siècle Europe.
Likewise, Freud summarized the most optimistic medical views of his era. He dabbled in hydrotherapy, electrotherapy, and hypnosis. He had great hopes for cocaine. Like many of his colleagues, he believed in powerful forces—in sexuality and then in the unconscious—that could be released in liberating ways. He employed Fliess’s theories about numerology. Freud was fascinated by telepathy or “thought transference,” a sideline that his inner circle suppressed in his own interest. He oscillated between skepticism and credulity. These contradictions merged attractively in Freud’s person. He offered the promise of cure in the guise of a grave philosopher.
That combination has a long history. The ancient Greek schools, the Stoics, Cynics, Skeptics, Epicureans, and Aristotelians, advocated forms of self-knowledge that would protect against mental perturbation. These ideas were reworked in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, in the aphorisms of Montaigne and La Rochefoucauld and even Immanuel Kant. Despite Freud’s substantial career as a researcher before he turned his attention to psychology, and despite the scientific patina he applied to his work, psychoanalytic theory can be understood as a throwback, to a tradition that predates modern medicine.
It is customary to speak of a pendulum that has swung away from Freud and will return in his direction. But it is equally plausible to see Freud as an exotic millennial figure, offering formulations that represent an uncharacteristic interruption in the slow progress of psychiatry from the work of Briquet and Janet to the current era, with its focus on nerve cells and neurotransmitters, its attempts to study mental illness through the use of autopsies, brain scanning, and behavioral genetics, and its broad interest, on the psychological front, in stress and trauma.
Certainly, the grand theories Freud espoused will not return. Breuer was on target when he complained that Freud was “given to absolute and excessive formulations.” Overstatement was Freud’s hallmark. “Each individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was provoked and in arousing its accompanying affect.” “Neurasthenia is always only a sexual neurosis.” “At the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood.” “Dreams are fulfillments of wishes.” The experience and repression of infantile fantasies of incest and murder is “a universal event in early childhood.” “The aim of all life is death.” “In the id, which is capable of being inherited, are harboured residues of the existences of countless egos” that bear the imprint of a primal patricide.
Freud’s more detailed contributions are yet less likely to come back into favor. Shameful desires are not the basis for paranoia. Ambivalence is not necessary for depression. No evidence supports the sex-centered mechanisms by which Freud set store: penis envy, castration anxiety, latent homosexuality, and the rest. Even the Oedipus complex sounds today like what Freud’s critics called it, an exaggerated and incomplete description of drives and constraints that roil childhood and family life.
Freud’s followers accepted the exaggerations or overlooked them as the inevitable concomitants of genius. And it is true that Freud brought something of value. He championed the talking cure, the most effective treatment then available for a range of mental afflictions. His contemporaries were experimenting along similar lines, but it was Freud’s astonishing version that captured the professional and then the popular imagination. Psychoanalysis, and the relentless pursuit of recondite symbols, was fresh and modern.
The development of psychoanalysis resembled product introduction in our postindustrial age. Freud began with a highly imperfect method—tracing symptoms to reminiscences—that gained his approach name recognition and market share. He then revised his theory and techniques making them broadly acceptable. Transference, as a concept, demanded a discussion of the patient’s attitudes in the therapeutic setting. Attention to the ego allowed for a consideration of the patient’s personality and characteristic approach to predicaments. Psychoanalysis became a less surprising, more comprehensive approach to the person.
Because it was fascinating, because it was popular, psychoanalysis attracted bright minds. They further transformed the discipline, jettisoning most of its distinctive aspects. Freud had emphasized the role of the unconscious and its revelation through dream interpretation, but his cases were always understandable in direct terms, as stories about family life. Psychotherapy moved away from the accompanying theory and in the direction of the tale telling.
Today, treatments with a Freudian ancestry help patients recognize difficult feelings and their origins. The goals are self-awareness and affect tolerance. Often there is no attempt to unmask shameful infantile drives. One contemporary school of psychoanalysis focuses on disruptions to parental attunement, in the patient’s childhood. Far from exercising surgical coldness, the therapist attempts to maintain minutely accurate empathy. The theory is that the patient sustained psychic harm that makes trust and intimacy difficult. The patient is presumed to be injured, not conflicted. Other forms of therapy, ones that focus on maladaptive cognitions or rigid patterns in relationships, have yet less need for a dynamic unconscious. They deal exclusively with accessible memories in relationship to current challenges.
Even Freud’s platonic ideal of analysis has gone by the boards. Freud was the extreme example, with his intrusive imposition of theory onto patients. But every treatment involves picking and choosing among issues the patient raises—the Cäcelie M. problem. The analyst applies theories and beliefs about social norms, and these opinions become apparent. Neutrality is impossible. Most schools of analysis now recognize that all therapy is a two-person game.
One way to frame Freud’s contribution is to say that he set out to explore the ramifications of infantile sexuality and almost incidentally developed a psychology suitable to the modern world. Projection may not be a cause of paranoia. Identification does not result in homosexuality. Depression can arise independent of narcissism. Conscience may not develop from the wholesale introjection of a feared father. But in observing processes like projection and introjection—probably in his own thought, more than his patients’—Freud provided a rich set of concepts and an invaluable vocabulary for the discussion of behavior. Of course, the terms have lost their original meaning. For Freud, introjection, identification, and the rest were manifestations of the Oedipus complex in its concrete form, with incest and murder at issue. Now they are simply ways of feeling or interacting. The words might be employed in any psychology, including one that does not recognize an unconscious.
Freud believed that, using sex as the dynamic force, he could explain a range of psychological phenomena, from hysteria to blighted love life to slips of the tongue. Because his simple hypotheses often failed and because the social environment changed dramatically—the brutal World War was a turning point—Freud kept modifying and adding perspectives. The result was that he developed a highly eclectic psychology.
Stripped of its underlying premises, this psychology proved workable. The account of mind and person begins with the premise that there are grave limitations to human rationality. Our thought, emotion, and character are partly products of animal drives. These drives have a developmental history. They change throughout childhood and after. In the course of development, the mind becomes segmented. Memory stores templates of important persons and interactions as they are experienced in childhood. Inner conflict emerges. The templates and the conflicting forces lead to limitations on the freedom to perceive accurately and behave adaptively in adulthood. Distortions of perception and self-awareness have characteristic forms—the various defenses. Guided self-examination can lead to improved self-awareness and then to less stereotyped behavior.
Had he encountered it, this list of ideas expressed at a high level of generality would have enraged Freud. It omits everything that distinguished psychoanalysis. But Freud had initiated a discussion, one that then proceeded in more pragmatic form, employing elements he had provided. Think of the varieties of Freudian metapsychology: topography, dynamics, economics, genetics, and structure. Set aside particular content, from anal fixations to conservation of psychic energy. In defining his five perspectives, Freud suggested that human life is worth considering complexly, in terms of unexamined thoughts; inner conflict; attachments and relationships; developmental history; and self, desires, and values.
Other frameworks might have served the purpose as well. Stripped down, Freud’s categories may sound by turns commonplace and arbitrary. But because he told compelling stories, because he legitimated defiance of convention, because he argued vehemently for an ever-changing set of viewpoints, Freud started a discussion and set its terms. He popularized psychology and gave rise, ultimately, to our own era, the age of self-examination and memoir.
Freud is known for his pessimism, but in retrospect, his writing, over much of his career, constitutes a high watermark for a certain sort of confidence. The optimism begins with the belief that recovering memories, or resolving the transference neurosis, invariably reverses mental illness. In time, Freud appended many caveats. Still, the bulk of his work suggests that, for the well-constituted patient, bringing the repressed to consciousness and resolving projections onto the analyst should result in the outright cure of even grievous afflictions.
Today we may still see what appear to be permanent resolutions of major mental illness with psychotherapy alone; but such outcomes are less frequent than Freud’s reports indicated. To pull back from faith in self-awareness entails loss.
The loss extends beyond the moderation of hope in the particular case. For the better part of a century, Freud’s followers believed that they understood the structure of thought, the course of human psychological development, and even the workings of groups. Psychoanalysis could be byzantine, but if one was willing to do the work, the discoveries were there to be mastered.
Starting with the Project for a Scientific Psychology, Freud’s program was expansive. He imagined that, through introspection and clinical observation, he could map the mind. We no longer share that conviction. Ego, id, and superego are convenient categories, but whether they correspond to anything concrete—brain circuits, say, or even stable aspects of self—is less clear. Today, the proper starting points appear to be emotions or personality traits that might correspond to pathways or centers in the brain. Fear and the sense of safety, introversion and extraversion, risk aversion and reward dependence—there is some hope that we can localize those feelings and traits. But a new structural model seems far off. Our understanding of the unconscious is about where it was before Freud began to write. We have lost our belief that we understand the nature of mind.
We have yet less certainty that we can explain group functioning through the building blocks of individual psychology. Social commentary was not Freud’s strong suit. He could be foresighted, but as often he missed the mark. Before and during World War I, Freud had a romantic’s faith in the Empire and in individual genius, expressed via the notion of sublimation. Freud wavered over the roles of civilization and sexual repression. Were they dangers or saving graces? He arrived at solidly negative sentiments about the human condition only along with the rest of Europe, in the economically troubled interwar years. And then he predicted the rapid demise of monotheism.
As with his psychology, what remains of Freud’s social theorizing are quite general thoughts, that something is wrong between us and our environment and that the problem will not be easily fixed. His central explanatory concept, in his books about religion and culture, was pure fable. There is no archaic heritage. The problem is not only that Freud’s claims were inconsistent or that we might disagree with certain of them. We no longer imagine that we can do better—discerning the origins or the future of culture by considering one or a few dynamic factors.
What, finally, do we make of Freud? Different interpretations of the evidence will lead to different conclusions. But it is undeniable that he was more devious and more self-aggrandizing than we had imagined him to be before researchers located the patients discussed in his dreams and case histories. There is a disturbing consistency in Freud’s indifference to inconvenient facts. The tendency runs through the whole of his career. His biographies, of Leonardo and Moses, are as distorted as his case reports. His sociology and theology are as arbitrary as his clinical interpretations. Repeatedly, he is less original than he makes himself out to be. Where he is most innovative, he is least reliable.
Freud was often a thoughtful observer of the vicissitudes of love. And he conferred a great benefit, in awakening the world to the beauties of psychotherapy. But he bullied his patients and misrepresented his results. He set in motion beliefs about ill health that had the effect of blaming victims and sometimes victims’ parents as well. Though he was reasonably liberal in his private views, Freud consolidated standard social prejudices about women and homosexuals.
Here is the final loss that the reevaluation of Freud has imposed on us, the loss of Freud the man. He represented himself as a poor boy who overcame anti-Semitism and the contumely of hidebound colleagues. He was brilliant, self-aware, kindly, patient, intuitive, brave, fierce, vigorous, and imperturbable—again, the ancient ideal of a philosopher, in the person of a cultured, cosmopolitan, witty, unbelieving Jew. Freud was the model intellectual, the hônnete homme, a modern paragon.
Of the personality traits, brilliance and vigor remain, along with some of the courage and self-awareness. Freud encountered less adversity than his autobiographical writings suggest. In his productive phases, Freud had about him something of the hypomanic executive, spewing forth ideas and editing them spottily. He was a poor judge of character, socially awkward, anxious, obsessive, self-justifying, overly reliant on reasoning, and shockingly unempathetic. He applied his theories stubbornly and then declared victory, in the office and in print. Throughout, he was a mythmaker, on his own behalf.
We may feel saddened and depleted—I do—at the loss of a hero. But then, the gradual revelation of a less straightforward, less competent, less lovable Freud contains an affirmation of Freudian precepts. What Freud believed of humankind applies to his own life. Men live at the mercy of their drives, shaped in childhood. What is hidden in people may not be admirable. As for us, the sometime admirers, Freud’s wisdom applies here, too. Our leaders—the embodiments of our ego-ideal—are our own constructions, arising from our needs. In the affairs of men, rationality is at a premium, and fantasies abound.