Freud is dead, or at least he should be. However, despite what some may claim, Freud still casts his shadows over us. In France, psychoanalysis still occupies a special place both among psychologists and in popular culture. The shelves of bookshops, in the psychology section, are overflowing with his works, and new translations are regularly praised. Psychoanalysts publish in droves on all kinds of subjects. It's been 15 years since the publication of the Livre Noir de la Psychanalyse triggered the "guerre des psys", but nothing has changed. Nor had anything changed after the various skirmishes of the Freud Wars. Freud and psychoanalysis still occupy a certain place in the teaching of psychology. D. Funder's The Personality Puzzle and Cervone and Pervin's Personality: Theory and Research, two leading textbooks on personality psychology, each devotes several chapters to Freud and psychoanalysis.
For anyone who knows anything about the history of science, this is hardly surprising. As Max Planck remarked, ideas don't change with arguments, but only when generations change. Psychoanalysis is a theory that had its heyday with the boomers. You'd think, and hope, that it would go with them. That said, ideas also have their force of inertia, and if nothing is done, Freud and his shadows will continue to dance among us, although there are excellent reasons for wanting to get rid of them.
My impression, built upon reading Freud and contemporary psychology, is that Freudian psychoanalysis is nothing but absurdities. Its study should be left to historians of ideas. It doesn't belong in a university psychology department. I reserve my opinion on contemporary psychodynamics and neuro-psychoanalysis for a later time. They are perhaps fertile fields of research. I haven't read enough about them to have an informed opinion on the matter. I intend to explore them in the coming years. On the other hand, it seems to me that to become these fertile disciplines, they had to expurgate a certain number of Freudian ideas. This is not an encouraging sign for psychoanalysts who wish to defend Freud.
The Case Against Psychoanalysis
My reading so far has led me to believe that four lines of argument justify an almost complete rejection of Freud and psychoanalysis. I'm going to present them briefly here, but over the coming months and years, I intend to delve back into psychoanalysis to develop what are for the moment mere intuitions. Each of these lines of thought is not in itself redhibitory; Freudian psychoanalysis can survive any of them when taken separately. Nevertheless, it seems obvious to me that their conjunction is fatal. Any scientific theory would be rejected if it suffered from such defects.
The first idea, perhaps the most obvious, is that the best data we currently have to explain human behavior is incompatible with Freud's theories. For now, I won't go into detail about what these data are, nor will I attempt to show why they are incompatible with Freudianism; I'll take the time to do so later, to present the best possible case. A Freudian might well reply that it is our current theories and data that are to be rejected. Indeed, in the wake of the replication crisis that is still affecting psychology, there are strong doubts about the quality of the data at our disposal.
I won't attempt to answer this objection head-on by wasting my time presenting and evaluating the quality of the corpus on which alternative theories to psychoanalysis are based. There is little point in doing so, especially as it seems to me that the objection can be avoided by offering a body of evidence converging in favor of these data, which would come not only from psychology but from multiple disciplines. In any case, I think it's fairer to respond by undermining the very foundations of the Freudian edifice.
To do this, we can follow a double line of argument. The idea is simple: it's not current data and theories that should be rejected, but Freud's, because they have no basis in either methodology or empirical data. Firstly, given the falsifications and lies of which Freud was guilty, the clinical material he uses in his writings can have no epistemic value. Secondly, this material, even if it did have value, does not allow him to defend the conclusions he wants to defend. And finally, because, for reasons Grünbaum analyzes in detail, the argument Freud uses to defend his theories has no force.
Freud could be saved if independent empirical studies confirmed his theories. However, my impression is that such studies do not exist. Does this mean that neither contemporary psychodynamics nor neuro-psychoanalysis have any proven empirical basis? Not at all! I'm not going to make any bets on the subject at the moment, as I'm far from having a clear view of this literature.
A final line of argument that I intend to explore in an attempt to justify a rejection of Freud is to show, to put it somewhat caricaturally, that his good ideas are not his own. In a sense, some of the foundational concepts of psychoanalysis were actually borrowed from contemporaries such as Pierre Janet, William James, Nietzsche, and others. These concepts can be seen in slightly different variations throughout their work.
These are the ideas I intend to explore and the arguments I intend to defend. As this is a long-term project, I still have a lot of research to do to present these arguments as fully and convincingly as possible. However, I may be wrong, and I'll come to realize as I read that the psychoanalytic position is stronger than I first thought. If it turns out that I'm wrong somewhere, I'll have no problem modifying my argument, or even admitting that I'm wrong. As Keynes said, when the facts change, I change my mind. I agree with Socrates who, in the Gorgias, says:
I’m happy to have a mistaken idea of mine proved wrong, and i’m happy to prove someone else’s mistaken ideas wrong, I’m certainly not less happy if’ I’m proved wrong than if I’ve proved someone less wrong, because, as I see it, I’ve got the best of it : there’s nothing worse than the state which I’ve been saved from, so that’s better for me than saving someone else. You see, there’s nothing worse for a person, in my opinion than holding mistaken views about the matters we’re discussing at the moment. (Gorgias, 458 a)
Is Psychoanalysis a Science?
There are, however, three ideas that I don't intend to develop. The question of the scientificity of psychoanalysis, the question of its efficacy, and the question of its internal theoretical incoherence. I don't think the first is a particularly interesting question, and it seems to me that the answer to the second is currently beyond our grasp, while the third would require an exegesis of Freud I don't feel like doing.
Science is a set of institutions whose function is to produce ideas and ensure their accuracy using a set of socio-technical processes. If psychoanalysts play along with these institutions, then psychoanalysis is a science. If they refuse to inscribe their practices within the framework of these institutions, then psychoanalysis is not a science. It's as simple as that. To answer this question would require a sociological survey, which I don't have the means to carry out, and the results of which I'm only moderately interested in, as I'm not sure what there is to learn from them.
The question of efficiency is more interesting, and a great deal of work has already been done on the subject. That said, the very basis of the problem seems to me to be conceptually too vague for us to arrive at an answer that would settle the debate. How, having no idea what a mental disorder is, can we hope to evaluate the effectiveness of a therapy that attempts to treat it? Clinical psychology still has a long way to go. Until then, I'll stay well away from debates on the treatment of mental disorders.