The Story of Psychology

by Morton Hunt

  Experimentation, however, is not the only way to do science; induction from observation is another. Having perceived a pattern in a mass of data, the scientist hypothesizes about its cause, then tests the supposition by looking at more examples. If they too fit the hypothesis, it is strengthened; if they fail to, it is weakened. It is this method that is the basis of psychoanalytic research.

  But the evidence so gathered, says the philosopher Adolf Grünbaum, is weak. For one thing, the observations that reveal a pattern have a “shared contaminant”—the analyst’s influence. After the analyst offers an interpretation of some piece of behavior, for instance, the patient may dutifully come up with a confirming memory (which may in fact be imaginary).88 For another, when free association is used to investigate such different areas as neurotic symptoms, dreams, and parapraxes, the agreement among the data may be the result of using a single method to explore different phenomena rather than a genuine concurrence of the findings.

  Grünbaum says that this does not warrant the conclusion that psychoanalysis is unverifiable; rather, it indicates that verification of its theories must come from well-designed extra clinical studies, either epidemiological or even experimental.89

  Many efforts toward that end have, in fact, been made. Some have involved laboratory experiments in which volunteers are subjected to a stimulus that, according to Freudian theory, should yield a particular result. Others, relying on tests to measure certain character traits among which there is supposed to be a psychodynamic connection, have sought the statistical correlations among those traits that would support the supposition. Still others have taken a developmental approach, observing and measuring the personality traits and behavior of children as they grow up to see whether character development proceeds according to Freudian theory or requires other explanations.

  By now a large body of such studies has accumulated. They vary greatly in methodological soundness, and range widely in scope, testing everything from overarching theory to small and specialized subtheories. This makes it difficult to weigh the cumulative outcome, but a few hardy scholars have sought to do so.

  One review of such studies, made some years ago by the psychologists Seymour Fisher and Roger P. Greenberg, focused more on results than on methodological adequacy, and rendered a split decision. Fisher and Greenberg named the following Freudian theories as being well supported: his concepts of the oral and anal character; the etiology of male homosexuality (Freud postulated that a hostile, rejecting father and a close, binding mother so intensify Oedipal rivalry as to inhibit the choice of a female partner); the origin of paranoia as a defense against homosexual impulses; several aspects of Oedipal theory; and as much of dream theory as concerns the dream’s function as an outlet for psychological tension.

  They cited as those found faulty the thesis that the dream is a camouflaged unconscious wish, the claim that psychoanalysis is superior to other therapies in the treatment of neurosis, some parts of the Oedipal theory, and many of Freud’s ideas about the female character.

  Their summation:

  When we add up the totals resulting from our search, balancing the positive against the negative, we find that Freud has fared rather well. But like all theorists, he has proved in the long run to have far from a perfect score. He seems to have been right about a respectable number of issues, but he was also wrong about some important things. If one considers only his formulations concerning men and if, further, one considers only his theoretical propositions…, his record of correct hits is excellent.90

  A later review of such studies, the 1981 edition of Paul Kline’s Fact and Fantasy in Freudian Theory, was more inclusive than Fisher and Greenberg’s and, according to Kline, more discriminating, because he drew conclusions only from research with the soundest methodology. Making no effort to appraise such larger Freudian theories as the death instinct and the pleasure principle, which are “metapsychological”— essentially philosophic, and so untestable—Kline found that no fewer than sixteen Freudian concepts have been verified. He summed up as follows:

  The objective evidence [provides] some confirmation of a tripartite division of mental activity into ego, super-ego, and id. Developmental theory is supported in that oral erotism [the erotic component in the infant’s oral pleasure], Oedipus and castration complexes appear to occur. Furthermore adult personality patterns like the oral and anal character can be generally observed. There seems no doubt that the defence mechanism repression is commonly used and other defences have been observed. Sexual symbolism is a verified phenomenon both within and outside dreams… [In sum] many of the Freudian concepts most important to psychoanalytic theory have been supported.91

  Decline and Fall—and Revival

  But by the time these partial confirmations had appeared, the prestige and influence of Freudian psychology and the popularity of psycho-analysis—always limited, to be sure, by its cost, if nothing else—were waning.

  Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, a congeries of pervasive social changes and important developments within the behavioral sciences undercut the status of the theory and the elitist appeal of analytic therapy.92

  The social developments and protest movements of those decades turned public attention toward broader and more external issues, the women’s movement generated bitter vocal opposition to Freud’s ideas about women, and spokespersons of the homosexual revolution fiercely assailed Freud’s ideas about homosexuality.

  In academic psychology, new and empirically based research was demonstrating many influences on child development other than those Freud had posited; in clinical psychology, there gushed forth an unending stream of briefer and more practical adaptations of psychoanalysis and of nonanalytic therapies; in psychiatry, in the 1950s and 1960s, tranquilizers and antipsychotic medications were beginning to empty mental hospitals of deeply depressed and moderately schizophrenic patients, and outside the hospitals medication appeared to be far more efficient and quicker than insight-oriented talk therapy.

  Psychoanalytic organizations had sought to cast psychoanalysis as a specialty within medicine,* but the American Psychiatric Association rejected or radically revised in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III (1980) and IV (1994) many Freudian-based diagnoses of mental illness. And as mentioned earlier, by the 1980s and 1990s a number of penetrating (but often tendentious) attacks on Freud’s scientific methodology and his personality appeared.

  No wonder Time magazine’s cover of November 29, 1993, was a portrait of Freud alongside the boldfaced question “Is Freud Dead?”—the answer apparently being self-evident.

  Guess again.

  Despite all the valid and invalid attacks on Freudian theory, many of Freud’s ideas have permanently perfused and modified our culture. “The world’s history is the world’s judgment,” said Schiller, and this is surely true in Freud’s case. After all the assaults on his character, the philosophic arguments about his theories, and the laborious efforts to validate or invalidate them, the measure of the man and his ideas is their impact on the history of psychology and on Western civilization. Today, Freud’s enemies and admirers agree, his ideas have permeated Western culture, spawning a host of variant psychotherapies and, more important, profoundly influencing the way artists and writers, legislators, teachers, parents, advertisers, and the majority of literate people think about human nature and themselves. As Fisher and Greenberg said in 1977, “Freud’s theories are now a basic part of our cultural substance,”93 and by any number of objective criteria, that is still undoubtedly so. But we all intuitively know it to be so. We have only to reflect for a moment on how often, and how naturally, we think in terms of Freudian psychology: the sexual symbolism of various objects, the secret (or at least half-secret) hostility of much humor, the unconscious reasons for mistakes and slips of the tongue, the hidden motives in risk taking and self-defeating behavior, the parental role in homosexual development, the everyday effort to look for the “real” reason someone has said or done someth
ing we find hard to understand, and on and on. Such ways of thinking pervade everyday life.

  These and similar beliefs are based on a larger one: the existence of the dynamic unconscious. It is this which Freud was alluding to when, late in life, he told an admirer, “I am not a great man—I made a great discovery.”94

  His great discovery, opening up what had been a vast unexplored area of the mind, permanently enlarged the dimensions and changed the direction of modern psychology, according to the British historian of the field, L. S. Hearnshaw:

  [Freud] brought psychologists face to face with the whole range of human problems, with the central questions that had been treated by great thinkers, artists and writers from ancient times, but had been almost excluded from the arid abstractions of the academic schools— with problems of love and hate, of happiness and misery; with the turmoil of social discontent and violence, as well as the trifling errors and slips of everyday existence; with the towering edifices of religious belief as well as the petty, but tragic, tensions of family life.95

  Raymond Fancher went even further:

  His demonstration of the importance and pervasiveness of unconscious mental factors was so effective that this once revolutionary idea is almost taken for granted today. The best art and literature of our time portrays human beings as creatures in conflict with themselves, subject to forces beyond their personal conscious control, and unaware of their own identities… Sigmund Freud was among the small handful of individuals whose work vitally affected not just a single field of specialization, but also an entire intellectual climate.96

  The central component of that climate remains as real today, many psychologists and psychiatrists feel, as when Fancher made that statement in 1979. As Jonathan Lear, a philosopher and psychiatrist at the University of Chicago says, Freud’s reputation rests on the “core idea” that human life is “essentially conflicted,” but that the conflict is hidden from us because it stems from wishes and instincts that are actively repressed because we cannot tolerate recognizing them consciously.97

  Yet others, even though they prize certain central concepts of Freudian psychology, fear that with the decline and fall of psychoanalysis those concepts are in danger of being forgotten. Eli Zaretsky, for one, feels less than optimistic that we will preserve the profound understandings Freud and psychoanalysis brought us. “Can [those understandings] survive the decline of psychoanalysis? Have the global speedup, the near collapse of the boundary between the public and the private, and computerization, which reduces the psychology of meaning to the transfer of information, eviscerated intrapsychic experience? Do our new insights into race, nations, and gender obviate the need for individuals to understand their own unique individuality?”98

  Offsetting this rather gloomy view, there has been, lately, a surprising development: a resurgence of interest in psychoanalysis—both as therapy and as psychology. (Newsweek ’s March 27, 2006, cover, heralding a long and deeply researched article,99 consisted of Freud’s portrait and the headline FREUD IS NOT DEAD.)

  In part, the revival represents a renewed interest in modern and greatly modified forms of analytic therapy. The American Psychoanalytic Association has actually grown a little in the past half-dozen years and now has 3,400 members, and a rival group, the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, has 1,500.

  But in part—and far more important—a number of elements in Freudian psychology have recently been validated by contemporary neuroscience, making real his 1905 fantasy that psychological phenomena would someday be explicable in physical terms. In a review of this evidence in Scientific American, Professor Mark Solms of the University of Cape Town says:

  For decades, Freudian concepts such as ego, id, and repressed desires dominated psychology and psychiatry’s attempts to cure mental illnesses. But better understanding of brain chemistry gradually replaced this model with a biological explanation of how the mind arises from neuronal activity. The latest attempts to piece together diverse neurological findings, however, are leading to a chemical framework of mind that validates the general sketch Freud made almost a century ago. A growing group of scientists are eager to reconcile neurology and psychiatry into a unified theory.100

  Solms goes on to list several ways that neuroscience has validated Freudian ideas, among them the following:

  —Neuroscience has shown that the major brain structures essential for forming conscious memories are not functional during the first two years of life, accounting for what Freud called infantile amnesia. As Freud supposed, it is not that we forget our earliest memories; we simply cannot recall them to consciousness. But this does not prevent them from affecting adult feelings and behavior. “It is becoming increasingly clear,” writes Solms, “that a good deal of our mental activity is unconsciously motivated.”

  —Neuroscientists have identified unconscious memory systems that account for some irrational phobias. Joseph LeDoux of New York University has shown that under the conscious cortex a neuronal pathway, bypassing the hippocampus—which generates conscious memories—sends perceptual information to the primitive brain structures that generate fear responses. The result: Current events often trigger unconscious memories of emotionally important past events, resulting in irrational conscious fear.

  —Even if much of our behavior is unconsciously driven, this does not prove Freud’s claim that we actively repress unpalatable information. But neurological case studies supporting the concept of repression are beginning to accumulate. Vilayanur Ramachandran of the University of California at San Diego reported a study, now famous, of a woman whose left arm was paralyzed by a stroke but who remained completely unaware of it for days, until Ramachandran artificially stimulated the right hemisphere of her brain; she then recognized that her arm was paralyzed and that she had unconsciously ignored the defect for eight days. But after the effects of stimulation wore off, she reverted to the belief that her arm was all right—and even forgot the part of an interview in which she had recognized the paralysis. Ramachandran, impressed, wrote: “The remarkable theoretical implication of those observations is that memories can indeed be selectively repressed…Seeing [this patient] convinced me, for the first time, of the reality of the repression phenomena that form the cornerstone of classical psychoanalytic theory.”101

  —Dreams, which many anti-Freudians explained in terms devoid of Freudian meanings, do, after all, have meaning. Although some dreaming is driven by brain chemistry and reflects random cortical activity, brain scans and other evidence show that dreaming is generated by a network of structures centered on the forebrain’s instinctual-motivational circuitry; this has given rise to a number of theories about dreaming similar to Freud’s. Solms and others have also found that dreaming stops completely when certain fibers deep in the frontal lobe have been severed (as by an accident or brain surgery)—a symptom that coincides with a general reduction in motivated behavior.

  Solms’s conclusion: “It appears that Freud’s broad brushstroke organization of the mind is destined to play a role similar to the one Darwin’s theory of evolution served for molecular genetics—a template on which emerging details can be coherently arranged…It is gratifying to find that we can build on the foundations he laid, instead of having to start all over.”

  In the end, we have to disagree with Freud’s modest statement that he was not a great man but had made a great discovery. Only a great man could have done so.

  * Freud felt that the use of the couch helped focus the patient’s attention on his own ideas, not on the analyst, but he also admitted having a personal motive: “I cannot put up with being stared at by other people for eight hours a day (or more)” (On Beginning the Treatment [1913], S.E. XII: 134).

  * The three works: The Future of an Illusion, 1927 (on the origins of religion); Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930 (on the control of human desires that makes society possible); and Moses and Monotheism, 1939 (on the origins of monotheism).

  * Freud’s theo
ry of female psychology has come to be widely considered parochial and culture-bound, and thoroughly disproven by the changes of the past four decades in the status of women and the nature of femininity. Freud himself admitted that his understanding of feminine psychology was “incomplete and fragmentary” and once said, “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does woman want?’” (Jones, 1955: 421).

  * A personal note: I remember being astonished when in the early 1950s I visited the psychiatrist Dr. Karl Menninger to interview him about suicidal patients and found him wearing a white coat.

  EIGHT

  The

  Measurers

  “Whenever You Can, Count”: Francis Galton

  At the 1884 International Health Exhibition in London, a small fenced-off area of the hall, only six by thirty-six feet, was grandly designated the Anthropometric Laboratory. In it, on a long table staffed by three attendants, were a number of pieces of simple apparatus, among them a pendulum and a response key, a handgrip and dial, a photometer with which to compare small patches of color, and a long tube that emitted a whistle when an assistant blew through it and whose pitch he raised by turning a calibrated screw plug at the end until the visitor could no longer hear it. For threepence, the visitor could be tested and measured for thirteen characteristics: reaction time, keenness of sight and hearing, color discrimination, ability to judge length, strength of pull and squeeze, strength of blow, height, weight, arm span, breathing power, and breathing capacity.1