Feudian Froo Froo
- I wrote this on the 24th December, 2007, while coming down with a fever. Completely inspired by Frederick Crews’ book The Follies of the Wise, this book seemed to prove to me that all this bullshit I’d been learning in my literature classes, although it may, in the end, be correct, has no evidence to back it up, and was the fancy or a crazed, coked-up…you’ll have to read it yourself. For me, here are the best bits:
Dear all,
The idea that Freud’s theories are proven by the extent to which we find them in literature is wrong; he stole many of his theories (repression, the super-ego, guilt feelings, the paternal image, the maternal image, and so on and so forth) from literary giants of his time and before. Nietzsche, for example, pre-empted Freud in that all actions and intellectual choices are egoistic, that we remain unconscious of the motives of our actions, that forgetting is an active step taken to preserve psychic order, that dreams use symbols to express our primeval selves, that comedy results from a sudden release of anxiety and that laughter entails being malicious with a good conscience.
You might believe in these statements, but there is no evidence to back up these claims. Psychoanalysis does not yield better results than art therapy, nor any other therapy, and yet it claims to be a science, and universally true. Surely, were that the case, the results would be better than for painting.
Freud wants us to worry about wanting to have sex with our mothers, or of being envious of our dads’ noses. Why, when we have so many more tangible worries? Frederick Crews, in his book The Follies of the Wise, says we should not.
These quotes have been cut down for time.
1) On letters Freud wrote to a friend about Emma Eckstien
“When the orthodox analysts first edited Freud’s correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess in 1950, they omitted everything that, in their judgment, lacked scientific interest. Republication, showed this unscientific category included everything from Freud’s cavalier approach to clinical sessions — his writing to Fleiss while an early patient was under hypnosis, for example, and his habit of napping while his later psychoanalytic ones were free-associating on the couch — to his naïve acceptance of Fleiss’s dubious theories of nasal-genital correspondence.
“The full letters also put on view the notorious case of Emma Eckstein, who Freud had grotesquely diagnosed as ‘bleeding for love’ of himself, whereas she was actually suffering from a half a meter of gauze that Fleiss had left within the remains of her nose after a mad-scientist operation that Freud, too, had underwent for his own ‘nasal reflex neurosis.’
“By designating her bleeding as psychosomatic Freud was exculpating both his surgeon friend Fliess and himself for having recommended the gruesome and pointless operation.”
2) On Frink
“Horace Frink, a married American patient and protégé, was having an affair with a patient, the bank heiress Angelika Bijur. Despite this testimony to his sexual orientation, Frink was told by Freud that he was a latent homosexual who stood in great peril of becoming an avert one. To avoid that fate, Freud prescribed, Frink would have to divorce his wife and marry Bijur, whom he also urged to divorce her husband, even though Freud had never met either of the allegedly unsuitable spouses.
“Freud’s transparent aim was to get his own hands on some of the heiress Bijur’s money. As he brazenly wrote to Frink, Your complaint that you cannot grasp your homosexuality implies that you are not yet aware of your phantasy of making me a rich man. If matters turn out all right let us change this imaginary gift into a real contribution to the Psychoanalytic Funds.”
The divorce and remarriage did occur, soon followed by the deaths of both of the abandoned, devastated spouses, an early suit for divorce by Frink’s new wife, and the decline of the guilt-ridden Frink himself into a psychotic depression and repeated attempts at suicide.”
3) On the Wolf Man case
The “Wolf Man,” Sergei Pankejeff, was one of Freud’s celebrity cases. He got five years of treatment from Freud, after which Freud said he’d successfully removed all of his symptoms and inhibitions. Pankejeff then became a celebrity charity patient, going from one awestruck analyst to the next.
When it became obvious that his symptoms had not changed at all, he was persuaded by “pension payments” and strong advice not to tell his story to outsiders. In Pankjeff’s words: “the whole thing looks like a catastrophe. I am in the same state as when I first came to Freud.” (1982)
Here’s the case: Pankjeff had dreams of about six or seven white wolves (actually dogs, as Freud would later admit) sitting in a tree outside his window. The wolves, Freud explained, were the parents; the whiteness meant bedclothes; their stillness meant the opposite, coital motion; their big tails signified, by the same indulgent logic, castration; daylight meant night; and all this could be traced most assuredly to a memory from age one of Pankjeff’s mother and father copulating, doggy style, no fewer than three or four times in succession while he watched from the crib and soiled himself in horrified protest.
Considering his wealthy upbringing (with a maid), Pankjeff would never have been in a crib in his parent’s bedroom. Pankjeff was in and out of psychoanalytic treatment for seventy years, and never got better.
4) On the Dora case
Key facts:
1) Dora’s father was having an affair with Herr K’s wife.
2) Herr K had taken an interest in Dora since she was 14, and was now pressing his attentions on her once again.
3) Dora’s father found those attentions convenient. Herr K’s misconduct seemed no worse than his own, and might allow him some more free time with Frau K.
4) When Dora complained to her father about Herr K’s attentions, he rebuffed her and sent her off to Freud, to be cured not just of her numerous tics and suicidal thoughts but also of her insubordination.
5) Dora was a virginal eighteen year-old.
Freud, only too pleased to oblige, demanded that Dora “become aware of her responsibility for her predicament, and on the basis of that awareness, modify her reactions, bringing them into conformity with the wishes of her father.”
Herr K had made his intentions evident by a forced kiss at 14, a verbal invitation to sexual activity at sixteen, and daily presents and flowers. Freud labored to show Dora not only that it had been hysterical on her part to spurn Herr K’s original kiss, but also that she had been in love with him all along.
“If Herr K had learned that the slap Dora gave him by no means signified a final ‘No’ on her part, or if he had resolved to press his suit with a passion which left room for no doubts, the result might very well have been a triumph of the girl’s affection for him over all her internal difficulties.”
On Freud the person
Freud was highly cultivated, sophisticated, and endowed with extraordinary literary power, sardonic wit, and charm, but he was also quite lacking in the empirical and ethical scruples that we would hope to find in any responsible scientist, to say nothing of a major one.”
On the Psychoanalytic Movement
“Its cult of the founder’s personality; its casually anecdotal approach to corroboration; its cavalier dismissal of its most besetting epistemic problem, that of suggestion; its habitual confusion of speculation with fact; its penchant for generalizing from a small number of imperfectly examined instances; its proliferation of theoretical entities bearing no testable referents; its lack of vigilance against self-contradiction; its selective reporting of raw data to fit the latest theoretical enthusiasm; its ambiguities and exit clauses, allowing negative results to be counted as positive ones; its indifference to rival explanations and to mainstream science; its absence of any specified means for preferring one interpretation to another; its insistence that only the initiated are entitled to criticize; its stigmatizing of disagreement as ‘resistance,’ along with the corollary that as Freud put it, all such resistance constitutes ‘actual evidence in favor of the correctness’ of the theory; and its narcissistic faith that, again in Freud’s words, ‘applications of analysis are always confirmations of it as well.’”
Enjoy Christmas, everyone,
Nick xx
