Word: freude
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This image raises anew the quicksand question. If Freud's theories are truly as oozy as his critics maintain, then what is to keep all the therapies indebted to them from slowly sinking into oblivion as well? Hypothetically, nothing, though few expect or want that event to occur. Surprisingly, Peter Kramer, author of the current best seller Listening to Prozac, comes to the defense of talking cures and their founder: "Even Freudian analysts don't hold themselves 100% to Freud. Psychotherapy is like one of those branching trees, where each of the branches legitimately claims a common ancestry, namely Freud...
Frederick Crews, a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and a well-known reviewer and critic, once enthusiastically applied Freudian concepts to literary works and taught his students to do likewise. Then he grew disillusioned and now ranks as one of Freud's harshest American debunkers. Even while arguing that Freud was a liar and that some of his ideas did not arise from clinical observations but instead were lifted from "folklore," Crews grows cautious about the prospect of a world suddenly without Freud or his methods: "Those of us who are concerned about pointing out Freud...
Such prudence may be well advised. Freud was not the first to postulate the unconscious; the concept has a long intellectual ancestry. Nor did Freud ever prove, in empirical terms that scientists would accept, the existence of the unconscious. But Jonathan Winson, professor emeritus of neurosciences at Rockefeller University in New York City, who has done extensive research on the physiology of sleep and dreams, now claims Freud's intuition of its existence was correct, even if his conclusions were off the mark: "He's right that there is a coherent psychological structure beneath the level of the conscious. That...
That, finally, may be the central problem with declaring Freud finished. For all of his log rolling and influence peddling, his running roughshod over colleagues and patients alike, for all the sins of omission and commission that critics past and present correctly lay on his couch, he still managed to create an intellectual edifice that feels closer to the experience of living, and therefore hurting, than any other system currently in play. What he bequeathed was not (despite his arguments to the contrary), nor has yet proved itself to be, a science. Psychoanalysis and all its offshoots...
Shortly after Freud actually died in 1939, W.H. Auden, one of the many 20th century writers who mined psychoanalysis for its ample supply of symbols and imagery, wrote an elegy that concluded...