Was Freud a Fraud?

The novelty of Freud's thought has waned by now but the 'unconscious' was a concept which had no scientific legitimacy prior to his work whereas nowadays it is an accepted norm and regarded as a fully integrated aspect of our psyche. All schools of modern psychotherapy regardless of theoretical persuasion are indebted wholly or in part to the work of Freud as are the many analysands (clients/patients) who have benefitted from it's insights. Of course there are many lousy therapists and cowboy interpretors but his basic postulate that unconscious drives significantly influence conscious decision-making won widespread acceptance and completely changed the intellectual landscape of the 20th century - the debatable elements such as Oedipal entanglement, the reductiveness of his treatment of childhood sexuality and so on have all been much revised but the 'unconscious' is the rock upon which all his work stands.

The dream is an exemplary product of this unconscious; it produces stories, situations and dramatic contexts in which we as 'actors' participate yet cannot consciously alter - we cannot step into our dreams and 'direct' them, they remain elusive to the active rational and 'floating' awareness of our conscious ego. That they belong to a wholly different domain of subjective experience is sufficiently indicated by the fact that once we awake we seldom remember even a fraction of all the adventures into which our dreams had thrusted us. I am most often conscious of the fact that I've woken up at the tail-end of a long story in which I have been fully engaged mentally and emotionally but can usually only remember the final segments. With effort I can trace my steps backwards and on occasion recall some of the elements of the dream - I have never remembered a dream in it's entirety - but those I've managed to reconstruct partially all indicate that something other than my conscious self is producing sense and meaning in my own skull; to which "I" am often a mere bystander.

Thus, there is an 'intelligent' narrative generating agency within our minds of which we have no conscious control and Freud proceeded merely from the assumption that this was important enough to warrant investigation.

The unconscious as a concept was around a long time; Freud himself gives examples of who used it and where and in what context and then goes on to show what differentiates "his" unconscious from theirs. There's no mystery here nor is there any especial claim towards originality. What was original is that he developed techniques to investigate it. What is controversial is not the technique itself ie 'free association" (by and large) but the interpretations he has given towards the accumulated body of knowledge built up through his analytical sessions. Thus, we have Lacan fifty years later talking about the "Freudian unconscious and ours" in a move to differentiate classical Freudianism from the psychoanalysis he himself was developing.

The best antidote to scepticism would be to read Freud himself starting with the Breur correspondence and the early case studies particularly that of Anna O. Here you will get a feel for a new science in the making; the "unconscious" is the basic discovery but the notion of there being a 'libidinal' economy and the existence of 'cathectically charged' repressed elements which influence conscious thought are lesser mentioned contributions of importance. The 'Interpretation of Dreams' is a key text which, while lengthy, the gist of which can be summarised in the analysis of two dreams 'The botanical monograph' and 'The dream of Irma's injection'. Providing associations to recalled dream material is usually a failsafe way to unravel the protective skein of those nodal points/areas of 'over-determination' in the unconscious - though I don't agree with Freud that the associations which occur in analysis point necessarily to the paths taken during dream construction. He answers this crucial objection only once himself - and in a pretty flimsy footnote.

Though overall a remarkably honest, and as a consequence, clear and careful expositor of his ideas [in comparison to the obfuscations that would blight post-Freudianism] he nevertheless was prone to the occasional sleight of hand. This question of dream analysis unveiling dream construction was an important evasion however as resting upon it lay the claim to having uncovered the means of interpreting the dream extant; it was enough to show that the dream provided a portal to unconscious material, and in fact, that is what sufficed alone for the purpose of demonstrating the psychoanalytic discovery but in pushing this connection he seems to have had an eye on the ultimate marketability of his ideas.

He is similarly evasive too when this question crops up again under a different guise in the 'Psychopathology of Everyday Life' where he counters Rudolf Schneider’s objection that ‘the emergence of determining associations to numbers that occur to the mind spontaneously does not in any way prove that these numbers originated from the thoughts discovered in the analysis of them’ with the response that a critical examination of this question (and thus the psychoanalytic technique of free association) ‘lay outside the scope of this book’. As far as I’m aware he never satisfactorily addressed this problem and if I was commissioned to expose an element of charlatanry in Freud’s work I would begin with these two evasions. If Freud was incorrect in assuming (or more likely simply didn't know) that there was a one to one mapping, or parallelism, between latent thoughts and later associations this wouldn't make any difference to the therapeutic efficacy of psychoanalysis but it would call into question some of the discipline's claims regarding psychic determinism.

I find much of Freud off-putting particularly some of his notions on human sexuality and the stages of libidinal attachment; anal sadistic, oral phase etc. and his rigid adherence to a narrow interpretation of "castration". The oedipal relationship has undergone a number of withering critiques and the eternal 'daddy-mommy-me' triangle has been put to rest by some psychoanalytic schools, notably the Lacanians. But what is the actual material available in which to construct a 'science' if not the testament of the patient's speech and how they choose to represent either their dreams, their past or their own interpretations of themselves? The material of psychoanalysis at the end of the day is composed of nothing that can be pinned down and analysed with a microscope; it's subject matter is not concrete and tangible like physics or the other hard sciences and shouldn't even be classified in the same bracket but this isn't to say that it doesn't yield discoveries which offer at times striking insights into the nature of the psyche.

There's also that other consideration that Freud's terminology itself has become hopelessly dated - in part at least because of how his own influence has altered our conceptions of the mind and human nature. We have responded to Freud in such a profound and dramatic fashion that what was once regarded as highly speculative and questionable science is now accepted as the default position of the human psyche - nowadays we simply accomodate without too much fuss behaviour and character traits that would have been previously regarded as neurotic and therefore 'pathological'; the "social structure" has loosened up considerably to admit much more diversity, a change hastened to no small extent by the identity politics of the 60's (liberation narratives etc.) itself underwritten by the academic percolation of Freudian insights

Critics of Freud get too distracted by a perceived need to apply the same standards of "scientific" verifiability towards the findings of psychoanalysis as are regularly demanded in the "hard" physical sciences. Part of the fault here lies in Freud's own manner of exposition which, at the time, was desperately attempting to secure legitimacy for a fledgling discipline which entailed the presentation to the world of an utterly unheard of methodology for curing nervous disorders.

In order to bolster his case for identifying the source of neurotic complaints which lay in hidden psychical mechanisms of causality (in the early case studies with Breur) Freud richly paraded his medical expertise and used such knowledge to systematically exclude the viability of alternative traditional explanations which were then hopelessly rooted in a fatalistic neurology.

There was for a long time a tacit understanding amongst the neurologist fraternity that cases of pathological neuroses were written irretrievably in the blood, tissues and pathways of the nervous system and as such weren't amenable to psychological intervention.

Freud upended this presumption but the question remains did he do so legitimately?

The method stumbled upon; "the talking cure", (or "abreactive catharsis") is, by a happy coincidence, almost identical to that age old remedy of relieving stress known the world over - simply listening intently and sympathetically to someone who is sounding off about their problems.

To turn this commonplace artificial extension of empathy - found among barkeeps, whores, priests and con artists since time immemorial - the best of whom have all developed the necessary antennae to perceive their clients 'inner wishes'; to turn this age old talent into a "science" and make the world believe they are listening to something new takes a special kind of genius to be sure.

Did he satisfactorily demonstrate the dream to be the pathway to this previously inexpressible domain, the unconscious?

I think it offers an approach but not the direct route or 'royal road' as he claims it does (it is highly debatable that latent dream thoughts are (re)discovered in the patient's conscious associations) - and so, in this sense, at least, I think he is being somewhat disingenuous. But overall the methodology when applied over time is wont to reveal deeply inlaid formative structures which condition conscious thinking and which in the absence of analysis our patient would be almost certainly blithely unaware of; and so the sleight of hand is both forgivable and understandable.

The biological need for food (giving rise to "the kill", "aggression"; or thanos) and sex (eros) are the irreducible constants of human nature and their recurrence in any psychoanalytical metapsychology shouldn't come as a surprise. Sooner or later, anyone who has let their normal wakeaday ego behind and melted into the surrounds of an analytic session will find themselves spouting themes centring on one or either of these pivots - that our sexual impulses for instance can be usefully discussed with reference to early childhood experiences is not something we find all that incredible today but it did constitute a revolution in Freud's day and on the whole I think this is something to be grateful for.