I had a dream today. . .

I usually forget my dreams, as I have them in the middle of the night. If I wake up and try to embed them in my memory, they’re gone by morning. (I think I should keep a notebook by my bed.) But if I have a dream right before I wake up, then I often remember it.  Here’s one I had this morning in the half-hour interval between when I awoke at 4 a.m. nabbed a snooze, and then woke up for good at 4:30.

I was in graduate school studying ecology with two other students, a man and a woman, under a woman professor. The classroom was on a dock by the sea, in a small white and windowless room.  At one point the professor told us that we had to take our final exam, but in a white lighthouse located at the far end of the dock.  As I was collecting my materials for the test, I picked up a toothbrush, and the professor told me, “You won’t need that.” I threw the toothbrush back with my belongings, but then picked up a hand puppet that was in the form of Steven Pinker, but with reddish hair.

For some reason this puppet could also sing (presumably via some electronic device inside it), and I demonstrated that feature in the lighthouse. The singing of Pinker Puppet was surprisingly good, and I remarked about this to the professor and other students. The professor said, “That’s nothing—you should hear his brother sing “Heartbreak.” [Pinker doesn’t have a brother.]  Then, as I was about to take the test, I realized I hadn’t studied all semester, and knew almost nothing about ecology. [This is true.] I then woke up with moderate anxiety.

At the end this was a variant of the standard Academic Anxiety Dream which many students and professors have (my Ph.D. adviser Dick Lewontin had it almost every night). The Pinker reference is obviously the “day’s residue”, as Freud put it, from having read some of Steve’s book Enlightenment Now before bed. But as for the puppet, the singing, the nonexistent song, and Pinker’s red hair and nonexistent brother, well, that’s probably my neurons firing randomly.

If you had a weird dream last night, or want to interpret mine, weigh in below.

 

UPDATE: Reader Miranda found an early picture of Pinker, lacking his signature Jewfro, from a 2011 New York Times profile by Carl Zimmer:

(From the NYT): BEFORE THE PH.D. Steven Pinker in 1971 with fellow Wagar High School students on a Canadian television quiz show.

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A new hypothesis about consciousness

In my view, there are two big problems of consciousness. The first is mechanical: how does it work? (This is called “The Hard Problem of Consciousness”.) What configurations of neurons create “qualia”, the sensation of conscious experience that includes pain, pleasure, self-awareness, and so on? Many theologians and obtuse academics maintain that we’ll never be able to understand how materialism can explain this, and thus use it to either attack materialism and “scientism”, or to plump for God, the Thing That Can Explain Stuff That Science Hasn’t Yet. I’m pretty confident that we’ll one day understand this, but surely not in my lifetime.

That’s the proximal or mechanical problem. The other is evolutionary: what selective pressures, if any, gave rise to consciousness? It surely evolved one way or another, because I doubt that microbes are conscious, but somewhere on the line between us and our microbial ancestors, animals became conscious. (I’m pretty sure that humans aren’t the only conscious animals!)

Now it’s not clear that there was natural selection for consciousness itself, for it may simply be a spandrel—a byproduct of other aspects of brain evolution and activity.

That is in fact the idea of David Oakley and Peter Halligan, professors of psychology and neuropsychology respectively, as outlined in their essay at The Conversation, “What if consciousness is not what drives the human mind?” Here’s a precis of their view; it’s based on a paper that I haven’t yet read (see link at bottom).

Most experts think that consciousness can be divided into two parts: the experience of consciousness (or personal awareness), and the contents of consciousness, which include things such as thoughts, beliefs, sensations, perceptions, intentions, memories and emotions.

It’s easy to assume that these contents of consciousness are somehow chosen, caused or controlled by our personal awareness – after all, thoughts don’t exist until until we think them. But in a new research paper in Frontiers of Psychology, we argue that this is a mistake.

We suggest that our personal awareness does not create, cause or choose our beliefs, feelings or perceptions. Instead, the contents of consciousness are generated “behind the scenes” by fast, efficient, non-conscious systems in our brains. All this happens without any interference from our personal awareness, which sits passively in the passenger seat while these processes occur.

Put simply, we don’t consciously choose our thoughts or our feelings – we become aware of them.

As I interpret their essay (see below), our adapted brain is constantly taking in information in a “stream of unconsciousness”, and processes this information in a way to further our reproduction, of which survival and an ability to get along with our fellow humans are components. Some of this leaks into our awareness as “consciousness”, but we neither choose what leaks out nor use it to adjust our behavior:

. . . this may leave one wondering where our thoughts, emotions and perceptions actually come from. We argue that the contents of consciousness are a subset of the experiences, emotions, thoughts and beliefs that are generated by non-conscious processes within our brains.

This subset takes the form of a personal narrative, which is constantly being updated. The personal narrative exists in parallel with our personal awareness, but the latter has no influence over the former.

The personal narrative is important because it provides information to be stored in your autobiographical memory (the story you tell yourself, about yourself), and gives human beings a way of communicating the things we have perceived and experienced to others.

This, in turn, allows us to generate survival strategies; for example, by learning to predict other people’s behaviour. Interpersonal skills like this underpin the development of social and cultural structures, which have promoted the survival of human kind for millennia.

Thus the reception, processing, and acting upon information are the results of natural selection, but consciousness itself is not. As the authors argue, it “does not confer any particular advantage.” At the end they get into issues of free will and responsibility, arguing that these are social constructions (yet also “embedded in the workings of our nonconscious brain”!) that have “a powerful purpose in society” and a “deep impact on the way we understand ourselves.” I’d argue that this is confusing (perhaps it’s explained more clearly in their paper), and even though these concepts may affect how “we understand ourselves”, they are illusions: in the authors’ view, they are not what we think they are.

So much for that. What intrigues me more is their idea that our consciousness is a spandrel, with the real adaptive work going on independent of our awareness. (We know this is true for some things, like our ability to drive from one place to another on cerebral autopilot.) If that’s the case, why the leakage? Is it really a byproduct of deep and unconscious stirrings in our brain—something that’s simply unavoidable given our wiring? Why aren’t we just zombies, with our brain doing everything without the need for consciousness? I doubt that, given our ignorance of how the brain works, Oakley and Halligan have an explanation for this, but their hypothesis is surely intriguing to ponder. It’s sort of the biological equivalent of quantum mechanics: something that’s deeply weird. 

I’ve put their paper and the link below; by all means weigh in below if you’ve read it.

_____________

Oakley, D. A. and P. W. Halligan. 2017. Chasing the rainbow: the non-conscious nature of being. Front. Psychol., volume 814 November 2017 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01924

Does hate have a home?

I’ve heard that, since Trump’s election, signs like these have sprouted all over the U.S. (a reader pointed this out the other day):

Now I understand the reasons for these signs: they’re addressing hatred towards groups of people, like Muslims, gays, African-Americans, and so on. (I doubt, however, that they mean that there’s no hatred of Nazis!) The signs are expressions  of welcome, which is great, and I expect that few readers would disagree with the reference to groups of people. I wouldn’t necessarily agree if the reference is to ideologies, though.  Could hate for the Republican Party have a home here?)

What I’m writing about, though, is the general use of the word “hater” or “hate” as terms of disapprobation. If you criticize someone’s behavior or beliefs, for instance, you’re written off as a “hater,” even if your emotions match the Oxford English Dictionary‘s definition given below (from the U of C online version):

Given that definition, yes, there are people and ideologies I hate, for I feel an intense dislike towards them. I won’t name them (two exceptions below), as I don’t want to get into arguments about individuals.

Some people, however, say its always wrong to hate. After all, you can make an argument based on determinism—to which I adhere—that nobody can freely choose how to behave, so empathy rather than hatred is the appropriate emotion. On the other hand, strong dislike is a motivator for many people to change. If you observe that many reasonable people hate your beliefs or behavior, that could be a factor leading your behavior to change, even under determinism. Or, if you’re a devout Christian, you might have the view of “hate the sin but love the sinner”, so that you dislike some behaviors but never any people.

So my question is twofold:

a. Do you feel it’s wrong to hate people or beliefs or systems of belief? If so, which ones? I’ve already said that I think it’s proper and not unseemly to hate all three, in the sense of feeling very intense dislike.

b. If you wish, tell us what you do hate. To give one example of beliefs I hate and someone I hate, it’s militant Islamism for the former and Donald Trump for the latter.

As your reward for answering these questions, here’s Hitchens on hatred (hint: he’s for it, and I remember that he said somewhere else that an example of a person he hated was Henry Kissinger):

On illness, dreams and encatment

About a third of the time I make long-distance trips, it seems, I come down with a cold or sore throat at the far end. This time I’ve got both, and I blame it on airplane contamination. As one expert at io9 notes, it’s not the “recycled air” that’s to blame for such illnesses (cabin air is actually drawn in from the outside, compressed, heavily filtered, and warmed), but rather unsanitary bathrooms, tray tables, and your seats. Aisle seats are said to be particularly susceptible:

[Microbiologist Charles] Gerba can rattle off horror stories that will make you never want to fly on an airplane again. It’s a good idea to avoid aisle seats, for example, because according to Gerba, those are the ones most likely to come in contact with — and therefore be contaminated by — other members of your flight. He offers up an extreme example to illustrate why this is.

I’ll let you read that disgusting illustrative example for yourself, but I don’t think the data are statistically significant. (4/6 sickened people were sitting in aisle seats, with an expectation under randomness of 2/6, giving a chi-square of only 3, which isn’t significant. But I’m sure someone can do a Fisher’s Exact test or point to an error.)  Still, I had my usual aisle seat, as I don’t like to disturb people when I get up.

Tray tables are known to be seriously contaminated:

Consider, for example, a study conducted by  [microbiologist Jonathan] Sexton back in 2007. He collected samples from a variety of surfaces across numerous everyday environments (including airplanes) and analyzed them for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (aka MRSA — a deadly superbug that before the 1990s was found primarily in hospitals).

“We went ahead and tested multiple tray tables across three different planes. Sixty percent of [the tray tables, across all of the planes] tested positive for MRSA.

“We [also] found it in personal vehicles, offices, workplaces — everywhere. In just about every instance it appeared more often in the airplanes, but that could also be due to our smaller sample size [of three airplanes].”

By comparison, Sexton found MRSA in 3% of personal vehicles, 3.24% of work offices, 6.25% of public restrooms, and about a third of the home offices tested — opposed to one hundred percent of the inspected planes.

Well, again we have a small sample, but I think subsequent work confirmed that tray tables are likely sources of infection. God knows what’s been on them! Had I been savvier I would have wiped mine down with antibacterial wipes, but who thinks of something like that before a flight? I don’t exactly carry antibacterial wipes with me.

And then there are the bathrooms, but I’m always scrupulous about those. I wash my hands thoroughly after using them (the procedure is to wash as long as it takes to sing “Happy birthday to you” twice), dry them, and then open the bathroom door using a paper towel, which I discard with a deft motion.

At any rate, I still blame the flight, so now I’m in bed with a cold and a bad sore throat. The upside is that Malgorzata brings me cherry pie in bed—and Hili has, for the first time, deigned to sleep with me in bed. I’m clearly spoiled!

Sick but encatted. (Photo by Malgorzata)

I slept fitfully last night, but had vivid dreams, as I often do while traveling. There were four of them, but I’ve forgotten one. Here are the other three with two styles of dream interpretation: mine and Freud’s. (Note: I don’t really believe that dreams always have a “meaning”, but sometimes they clearly incorporate one’s real fears, experiences, or imaginings. The dreams below are real but the interpretations are fabricated.)

Dream 1:  I was going somewhere with a wheelchair. I wasn’t using the wheelchair, as I wasn’t crippled or lame, but for some reason it belonged to me and I had to push it around wherever I went.  At some point I lost it and was frantically looking for it, but didn’t find it.

Coyneian interpretation: This represents my fear of getting old, which is often with me as I age.
Freudian interpretation: The wheelchair represents the trauma I carry about from once seeing my mother naked.

Dream 2:  I was sitting at a very small bar (it seemed to seat just two people and was covered with plush leatherette) with a friend. The man behind the bar was trying to get me to join some kind of promotion for ice cream, whereby I’d join a club that would accumulate rewards for me as I bought more ice cream. But when I asked the man what the rewards were, he refused to tell me.

Coyneian interpretation:  This represents my recent attempt to lose weight by cutting out carbs, including giving up ice cream and other sugary treats. My fear is that such abnegation will not pay off.
Freudian interpretation:  As a small child, I once saw a white horse with a large penis urinate in the street. Thinking I’d develop a generative organ of that size, I’ve been permanently scarred by my failure to do so.

Dream 3: I was in a small cabin on a cruise ship that was docked, and trying to study for an upcoming final exam. But at the same time I realized I was supposed to be exercising, and was trying to figure out a way to exercise and study at the same time. I wound up lying on the bed with a book and kicking my legs vigorously.

Coyneian interpretation:  As I have several ongoing tasks simultaneously, this represents both my fear that I won’t get them done and my unsatisfactory attempts to succeed.
Freudian interpretation:  The latent dream-thought is my desire to be both a man of action and a man of intellect, much like my hero T. E. Lawrence (that much is true). By kicking while studying, I’m ineffectually trying to realize that goal. Alternatively, this could be repressed hostility against my father, trying to kick him for urging me to be a diligent scholar.

I don’t have much truck with Freud, but I surely do like Hili and cherry pie!

Is there anything good about Freud’s legacy?

Lately I’ve been talking about Fred Crews’s new 600-page critique of Freud, Freud: The Making of an Illusion, and you can find my take (postive) here. The book, in concert with Crews’s earlier work, and many other critics, pretty much demolishes not only the scientific pretensions of psychoanalysis, once Freud’s big gift to the world, but also the man himself, who is revealed, as he is increasingly being shown, as pretty much of a charlatan. Not just an incompetent, but someone who actually realized that he was making up stuff and consciously lying, but doing so because he had a desperate drive to be famous.

If psychoanalysis is on the way out, as it is, and Freud is pretty much known to have made up a lot of the clinical stuff he wrote, including his supposed “cures” (which weren’t), then what remains of the man? His theories of hysteria and neurosis, of the Oedipus complex and repression of early trauma, have been debunked. Even his view that we’re driven by unconscious factors was not original with him, and assumes a completely different meaning now that neuroscience is on the scene.

In a new piece in the New Yorker, which doubles as a review of Crews’s book and a chronicle of Freudianism’s downfall, staff writer Louis Menand tries desperately to find some good bits of Freud’s legacy. His article, “Why Freud survives” (subtitle, “He’s been debunked again and again—and yet we still can’t give him up”), unfortunately fails to redeem Freud’s legacy even a little bit.

By and large, Menand agrees with Crews’s conclusions: that Freud was a man corrupted by ambition, and who devised a watertight, non-refutable theory of human behavior that, in the end, led to a practice that was no better than placebo, drugs, or other talk therapy. Menand’s main criticism of Crews’s book is that it’s too critical:

That year [1998], in an interview with a Canadian philosophy professor, Todd Dufresne, Crews was asked whether he was ready to call it a day with Freud. “Absolutely,” he said. “After almost twenty years of explaining and illustrating the same basic critique, I will just refer interested parties to ‘Skeptical Engagements,’ ‘The Memory Wars,’ and ‘Unauthorized Freud.’ Anyone who is unmoved by my reasoning there isn’t going to be touched by anything further I might say.” He spoke too soon.

Crews seems to have grown worried that although Freud and Freudianism may look dead, we cannot be completely, utterly, a hundred per cent sure. Freud might be like the Commendatore in “Don Giovanni”: he gets killed in the first act and then shows up for dinner at the end, the Stone Guest. So Crews spent eleven years writing “Freud: The Making of an Illusion” (Metropolitan), just out—a six-hundred-and-sixty-page stake driven into its subject’s cold, cold heart.

The new book synthesizes fifty years of revisionist scholarship, repeating and amplifying the findings of other researchers (fully acknowledged), and tacking on a few additional charges. Crews is an attractively uncluttered stylist, and he has an amazing story to tell, but his criticism of Freud is relentless to the point of monomania. He evidently regards “balance” as a pass given to chicanery, and even readers sympathetic to the argument may find it hard to get all the way through the book. It ought to come with a bulb of garlic.

Well, unrelenting revelatons of Freud’s unsavory character and work isn’t by itself a criticism, for Freud may have been a pretty dubious character and his work largely bogus.  That is in fact the take I get from what I’ve read about Freud (including his own works: The Interpretation of Dreams is, to a scientist, a long and torturous exercise in confirmation bias).  So why strive for a nonexistent “balance” if there isn’t one? Menand also psychoanalyzes Crews’s speculation that Freud had an illicit affair with his sister-in-law Minna Bernays (not a trivial matter for a psychoanalyst who boasted that he never did anything like that, and indeed, there’s some evidence for this affair) by saying “A Freudian would suspect that there is something going on here.” He’s referring to Crews’s discussion, and this is simply an ad hominem remark, a way to diminish Crews’s criticisms by saying that they’re coming from his previous infatuation with Freud and subsequent disappointment. But scholarship is scholarship, and Menand can’t find a chink in Crews’s armor here.

Well, Menand tries to find some “balance”. But he comes up with only two good things to say about Freud’s legacy—even after admitting, with Crews, that “Freud was a lousy scientist.”  Menand mentions talk therapy, but adds that psychoanalysis is no better than placebo and that there are other talk therapies, with no evidence that psychoanalysis is superior to others. (Indeed, cognitive behavioral therapy seems to work better for many issues, and true psychoanalysis demands that the patient give up years of time and many dollars.). But there’s also the unconscious:

People also find appealing the idea that they have motives and desires they are unaware of. That kind of “depth” psychology was popularized by Freudianism, and it isn’t likely to go away. It can be useful to be made to realize that your feelings about people you love are actually ambivalent, or that you were being aggressive when you thought you were only being extremely polite. Of course, you shouldn’t have to work your way through your castration anxiety to get there.

Exactly. This contribution is pretty much independent of the whole complicated armamentarium of psychoanalysis.  So if you want to say that Freud’s legacy was, along with others, to make us aware that we’re not 100% conscious of why we do what we do, then let him have that. But realize, too, that neuroscience, combined with materialism, offers an even deeper explanation.

And then there’s this special pleading for Freud (my emphasis):

As Crews is right to believe, this Freud has long outlived psychoanalysis. For many years, even as writers were discarding the more patently absurd elements of his theory—penis envy, or the death drive—they continued to pay homage to Freud’s unblinking insight into the human condition. That persona helped Freud to evolve, in the popular imagination, from a scientist into a kind of poet of the mind. And the thing about poets is that they cannot be refuted. No one asks of “Paradise Lost”: But is it true? Freud and his concepts, now converted into metaphors, joined the legion of the undead.

Sadly, what “unblinking insights” that Freud offers into the human condition aren’t mentioned by Menand. But if Freud is turned into a “poet of the mind”, one whose insights “cannot be refuted”, then how can he give us any insight into the human condition? For surely if those insights are true, they must be shown to be true by rationality, repeatable observations, testing, and experimentation, not by poetry. And they must be capable of being refuted! Here we have the New Yorker‘s frequent claim that there are “ways of knowing beyond science.”  Yes, insofar as poets appeal to our personal love of language, and make us think about ourselves and our lives, they can’t be refuted, for they’re offering a personal and subjective experience. But they can be refuted if, it’s claimed, they tell us something about human behavior. Why doesn’t Menand see this?

Finally, Menand ends with another watery encomium towards Freud (my emphasis):

Crews’s idea that Freud’s target was Christianity appears to be a late fruit of his old undergraduate fascination with Nietzsche. Crews apparently once saw Freud as a Nietzschean critic of life-denying moralism, a heroic Antichrist dedicated to liberating human beings from subservience to idols they themselves created. Is his current renunciation a renunciation of his own radical youth? Is his castigation of Freud really a form of self-castigation? We don’t need to go there. But since humanity is not liberated from its illusions yet, if that’s what Freud was really all about, he is still undead.

Okay, so Freud helped liberate us from our illusions—and I’ll credit him with a clearsighted atheism. But what other illusions? What insights did he offer? Menand doesn’t say. Freud’s still undead the way other miscreants are undead: their bad ideas are still around. You can find them in many college humanities departments.

A Freud contretemps in the Guardian

The other day I gave a positive take on Fred Crews’s new book, Freud: The Making of an Illusion, which pretty much demolishes—if it weren’t already wrecked—the image of Freud as a relentless truth seeker who remade our view of humanity. Crews has been examining Freud and his “science” for years, and this is his latest and last attempt to show that the man was a fraud: a greedy, idea-stealing, ambitious confector of bad ideas.

What really irks me about Freud is the profoundly pseudoscientific nature of his “discoveries”, which were not based on on consistent research that was tested, criticized, and then affirmed by others, but comprised mere anecdotes from his case studies, forced into the Procrustean bed of  “science”. Ideas such as repression and the Oedipus and Elektra complexes were unsubstantiated fantasies, yet for years were integral parts of psychoanalytic therapy. How many people paid lots of money for no help at all, or were even damaged by this junk?

Even the Guardian, in a new published dialogue between Crews and Susie Orbach, a British writer and psychoanalytical psychotherapist (h/t reader Diki), admits this at the outset:

Since Freud’s death in 1939, however, a growing number of dissenting voices have questioned his legacy and distanced themselves from his ideas. Now Freud is viewed less as a great medical scientist than as a powerful storyteller of the human mind whose texts, though lacking in empirical evidence, should be celebrated for their literary value.

Well, “powerful storytelling” is just that: storytelling. It’s not science, just as the “powerful storytelling” of the Bible is neither science nor fact.  And really, should we “celebrate” stories that were used in attempted cures of the mentally disturbed, but had no effect—or detrimental ones?

The email give-and-take between Crews and Orbach is enlightening, with Crews relentlessly hurling at Orhbach a single repeated question: what was true about Freud’s theories? Orbach evades, saying that, well, Freud did initiate the “talking cure”, regardless of the efficacy of his methods. (Crews points out that “a better candidate for empathic talk therapy would be the Swiss Paul Dubois”.)

And Freud wasn’t very “empathic”. He hectored and was mean to his patients, often didn’t listen to them or even fell asleep when they were speaking, and instead of really trying to understand them, shoehorned their free-associations into his own fallacious ideas, regarding patients as cash cows and springboards to his own renown.

Here’s a sampling of the dialogue:

Orbach:  You [Crews] claim you left Freud 30 years ago but your continued obsession with the man, with his work, with proving that Freud was contradictory, goes to show the continuing significance, not of Freud the man per se, but of his ideas and impact on a wider, cultural level. His work has had an impact of such magnitude that it’s not possible for us to think about what it means to be human, what motivates us, what we yearn for, without those very questions being Freudian.

Freud’s conceptions of the human mind and its complexity, whether exactly accurate, are not at issue here.

But Crews’s examination and demolishing of Freud doesn’t show that Freud’s ideas were right, only that they were influential and need reexamination. Psychoanalysts and cultural studies professors, infatuated with Freud, are loath to give him up, even though, as a scientist, he was a miserable failure. Crews bores in:

If, as you say, psychoanalytic theory has functioned as a powerfully shaping “explanatory tool”, surely it matters whether Freud’s explanations ever made empirical sense. If they didn’t, the likelihood is considerable that he raised false hopes, unfairly distributed shame and blame, retarded fruitful research and education, and caused patients’ time and money to be needlessly squandered. Indeed, all of those effects have been amply documented.

In your writings, you assert that Freud’s emphasis on the Oedipus complex was androcentric and wrong; that he misrepresented female sexual satisfaction and appears to have disapproved of it; that envy of the penis, if it exists at all, is not a key determinant of low self-esteem among women; and that his standard of normality was dictated by patriarchal bias, thus fostering “the control and subjugation of women”.

This list, which could be readily expanded, constitutes an indictment not only of harmful conclusions but also of the arbitrary, cavalier method by which they were reached. Yet elsewhere in your texts, you refer to Freud’s “discovery of the unconscious” and to his “discovery of an infantile and childhood sexuality”. Were those alleged breakthroughs achieved in a more objective manner than the “discovery” of penis envy? What are the grounds on which any of Freud’s claims deserve to be credited?

Orbach’s response, that she and Crews are on “different planets”, is pretty much on the mark, for she sees Freud as some kind of unspecified humanist even if lacking empirical achievement, and indeed, somehow finds merit in Freud being part of the great tradition of science that becomes passé:

Orbach: Knowledge is provisional. It is not static, and the kinds of knowledge of the consulting room exquisitely express this. This is not to say we don’t know anything. Therapists build up considerable knowledge about the way the human mind deals with the indigestible. People don’t come because they are happy, they come because their life has stalled. They perceive themselves to have got stuck, they feel emotionally constipated. They suffer with intrusive self-critical thoughts. Addressing these things is the meat and potatoes of our work. It is out of this engagement that our understandings emerge. Subjectivity, particularly in the process of self-reflection and potential change, is not empirical per se. It is a lived experience, and analysis provides a frame for the individual to investigate their modes of being, feeling and thinking. Psychoanalysis is the study of human subjectivity. It is a clinical practice. It theorises the vicissitudes of human attachment, of the psychological development of mind and body that occur within a relational, cultural field.

But of course that says nothing about Freud, and Crews reminds her “But weren’t we talking about Sigmund Freud?” He then zeroes in on empiricism again:

Crews: I find it striking that Freud vanished from your discourse as soon as I asked you to say why we ought to believe any of his propositions. That issue is crucial to an assessment of his legacy. His unsupported claims – for example, that repressed incidents from the first years of life can be reliably unearthed; that, thanks to phylogenetic programming, all toddlers wish to kill their same-sex parent and copulate with the other one; that women are biologically inferior, childlike, devious and masochistic – have yielded many noxious consequences.

One such consequence has been an ongoing disregard, by psychoanalysts and their academic allies, of the principle that hypotheses ought to be held accountable to a preponderance of evidence. Freud’s psychological writings contain not a single item of raw data. We meet only “psychoanalytic findings”, suave stories, evasions and heroic posturing. That charade has seduced many an unwary professor, including yours truly 50 years ago. Even today, regrettably, the Freudian vogue in its least rational (Lacanian) form remains entrenched in the humanities.

Freud, though not on hand to defend himself, has a lot to answer for. What can you enter on the other side of the ledger?

Orbach has nothing to enter except a few mutterings about Freud’s contribution to our understanding of bisexuality, which turns out not to be the concept Orbach actually uses, and even one that wasn’t Freud’s own idea, but was stolen from his friend Wilhelm Fliess.

I found this dialogue illuminating, for it shows the conflict over Freud between a hard-nosed empiricist and (to my mind) a soft-brained psychoanalyst.  By now I’ve read a fair amount by and about Freud, and I have to say that I can’t see a substantial “contribution”. It’s time to pass the man by and try to clean up the mess he left in cultural studies and psychotherapy.

Freud the fraud: a new book

I’m about halfway through the 600-page book (with over 100 additional pages of notes) by my friend Fred Crews, Freud: The Making of an Illusion, which will be formally released on Tuesday. It’s an excellent read: Fred was formerly chair of the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley, and writes clearly and engagingly. If you want to know why Freud was a fraud, and has fallen from grace, read this book, which attempts to answer the question, “How did a poor but ambitious Jewish boy from Vienna turn himself into a renowned doyen of psychoanalysis?” It’s not a full biography, for it concentrates on Freud’s early years when he transformed himself from a failed nobody into a world-famous figure. I’ll give the Amazon summary, which is accurate:

From the master of Freud debunkers, the book that definitively puts an end to the myth of psychoanalysis and its creator

Since the 1970s, Sigmund Freud’s scientific reputation has been in an accelerating tailspin―but nonetheless the idea persists that some of his contributions were visionary discoveries of lasting value. Now, drawing on rarely consulted archives, Frederick Crews has assembled a great volume of evidence that reveals a surprising new Freud: a man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who in fact never cured anyone, who promoted cocaine as a miracle drug capable of curing a wide range of diseases, and who advanced his career through falsifying case histories and betraying the mentors who had helped him to rise. The legend has persisted, Crews shows, thanks to Freud’s fictive self-invention as a master detective of the psyche, and later through a campaign of censorship and falsification conducted by his followers.

This is no exaggeration; Crews’s extensive work has turned up the picture of a fiercely ambitious, self-aggrandizing man who would stop at nothing—including scientific fraud, rewriting his personal history, blatant sycophancy, and even hastening the death of a good friend through misapplication of “cocaine therapy”—to make his name. (Freud’s extensive use of cocaine, which he considered a medical panacea, on himself and his patients is especially disturbing.) He succeeded in his ambitions, of course. But from Crews’s earlier work (reprised in more detail in this book), and the research of others, we now know that Freud carried on his fraudulent “science”—which involved a hefty dose of confirmation bias and simply making up stuff—after he’d become a famous psychoanalyst.

The front-page review of the book in today’s New York Times, by George Prochnik, is largely negative, but Prochnik’s assessment is way off. He decries the book’s negativity, but in fact Freud was pretty much an odious character, and his “science”, and even his insights into the psyche, were largely worthless. (Crews has emphasized here and in his earlier writings that what is seen as valuable in Freud’s ideas was developed by people before him, and Freud added almost nothing except a bunch of specious and now-discredited hypotheses.)

Prochnik:

Yet, confoundingly, Freud “is destined to remain among us as the most influential of 20th-century sages,” Crews writes, claiming that the attention bestowed on him by contemporary scholars and commentators ranks with that accorded Shakespeare and Jesus. Here is a fascinating conundrum: The creator of a scientifically delegitimized blueprint of the human mind and of a largely discontinued psychotherapeutic discipline retains the cultural capital of history’s greatest playwright and the erstwhile Son of God.

Crews is right that the matter demands further investigation, but this is not the book he has written. Instead “Freud: The Making of an Illusion” focuses on the man — specifically how a reflective young scientist with high ambitions and gifted mentors lost perspective on his “wild hunches,” covered up his errors and created “an international cult of personality.” In practice, this translates into 700-plus pages of Freud mangling experiments, shafting loved ones, friends, teachers, colleagues, patients and ultimately, God help us, swindling humanity at large. Here we have Freud the liar, cheat, incestuous child molester, woman hater, money-worshiper, chronic plagiarizer and all-around nasty nut job. This Freud doesn’t really develop, he just builds a rap sheet.

But Freud’s character and duplicitous practices were already in place when he was a young medical student, and in that respect he didn’t develop: he remained the same man when he later hit on a set of ideas that were thought to be not only culturally transformative, but personally curative. Freud’s acolytes, as is well known, have bowdlerized his history, censoring letters and documents that make him look bad, and not looking too hard at Freud’s supposed “cures” (which didn’t take). Only now have people like Crews begun to delve into Freud’s archives (his letters to his fiancee, quoted extensively by Crews, are telling), and the results aren’t pretty. I’m not an expert on Freud, but Crews’s scholarship paints a damning portrait of the man—and the scholarship, though conveyed in lively words, is extensive. Tellingly, nowhere in Prochnik’s review does he find fault with Crews’s scholarship and evidence.

Google says this about Prochnik:

GEORGE PROCHNIK’s essays, poetry, and fiction have appeared in numerous journals. He has taught English and American literature at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is editor-at-large for Cabinet magazine, and is the author of In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise and Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology. 

Prochnik hurls this brickbat at the end:

Crews has been debunking Freud’s scientific pretensions for decades now; and it seems fair to ask what keeps driving him back to stab the corpse again. He may give a hint at the opening of this book, when he confesses that he too participated in the “episode of mass infatuation” with psychoanalysis that swept the country 50 years ago. The wholesale denigration of its founder is what we might expect in response to a personal betrayal of the highest order, such as only an idol can deliver. Paraphrasing Voltaire, if Freud didn’t exist, Frederick Crews would have had to invent him. In showing us a relentlessly self-interested and interminably mistaken Freud, it might be said he’s done just that.

This is unfair. Yes, Crews was once taken by Freud’s ideas, and was slowly disillusioned. Given that those ideas dominated much of twentieth-century thought—Freud is ranked with Einstein and Marx as one of the three Jewish men who changed modern humanity’s self image—it’s completely fair to reveal what one found when further digging into Freud’s life and practice. What Prochnik is doing here is psychoanalyzing Crews, and blaming the book’s “negativity” on an intellectual acting-out based on disillusionment. And even if that were true—and I’m sure it’s not—Crews’s scholarship stands on its own, and does indeed show us a “relentlessly self-interested and interminably mistaken Freud”. One could well question Prochnik’s motivations in writing a negative book review while neglecting the facts that the book adduces, but psychoanalysis of an author is a mug’s game.

I’m not writing this defense just because I know Fred, but because Prochnik’s review is unfair and inaccurate. If you have any interest in Freud and psychoanalysis, I highly recommend this book. It’s by no means dull or tedious, for the writing is great and the evidence damning.

Crews and his book

The Lost Mariner: a short video inspired by Oliver Sacks

Well, I confess that I’ve taken something from Brainpickings, but only because it was tweeted approvingly by Jennifer Ouellette. “The Lost Mariner” is a 6-minute film centered on a patient described in Oliver Sacks’s popular book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. You can find more information about the personnel involved, and all the prizes the film garnered, at the Vimeo site. In 2015, Brainpickings described the subject studied by Sacks:

One of those patients was Jimmie G. — a “charming, intelligent, memoryless” man admitted into New York City’s Home for the Aged with only an unfeeling transfer note stating, “Helpless, demented, confused and disoriented.” Jimmie G. is the subject of the second chapter, titled “The Lost Mariner,” which Dr. Sacks opens with an epigraph from the great Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel:

“You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all… Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.”

In the beautiful short film The Lost Mariner, independent animator Tess Martin brings Jimmie G.’s rare memory condition to life using photograph cutouts and live action. The effect is a stunning visual analog to the disorienting see-saw of reality and unreality constantly rocking those bedeviled by memory impairments, exposing the discomfiting yet strangely assuring truth in Buñuel’s words.

Wikipedia describes Jimmie G.’s ailment like this:

• “The Lost Mariner”, about Jimmie G., who has lost the ability to form new memories due to Korsakoff’s syndrome [JAC: the syndrome is associated with long-term abuse of alcohol, and you forget everything that happens to you within minutes.]. He can remember nothing of his life since the end of World War II, including events that happened only a few minutes ago. He believes it is still 1945 (the segment covers his life in the 70s and early 80s), and seems to behave as a normal, intelligent young man aside from his inability to remember most of his past and the events of his day-to-day life. He struggles to find meaning, satisfaction, and happiness in the midst of constantly forgetting what he is doing from one moment to the next.

The entire chapter by Sacks is in the New York Review of books (free); Jimmie was 49 when admitted to the Home, and is named by Sacks as “Jimmie R.” Read it to remind you of Sacks’ humanity, empathy, and remarkable ability to write.

Click on “vimeo”, and then on the enlarging box ate the vimeo site, to see it on full screen.

The man who visits Jimmie is his brother: the only person he consistently recognizes. He forgets everyone and everything else, including the doctor, within a few minutes. All of us, but especially Sacks, would be curious about what that would be like, and how it would affect your life and well being.

Here’s a bit from Sack’s chapter:

“What year is this, Mr. R.?” I asked, concealing my perplexity under a casual manner.

“Forty-five, man. What do you mean?” He went on, “We’ve won the war, FDR’s dead, Truman’s at the helm. There are great times ahead.”

“And you, Jimmie, how old would you be?”

Oddly, uncertainly, he hesitated a moment, as if engaged in calculation.

“Why, I guess I’m nineteen, Doc. I’ll be twenty next birthday.”

Looking at the gray-haired man before me, I had an impulse for which I have never forgiven myself—it was, or would have been, the height of cruelty had there been any possibility of Jimmie’s remembering it.

“Here,” I said, and thrust a mirror toward him. “Look in the mirror and tell me what you see. Is that a nineteen-year-old looking out from the mirror?”

He suddenly turned ashen and gripped the sides of the chair. “Jesus Christ,” he whispered. “Christ, what’s going on? What’s happened to me? Is this a nightmare? Am I crazy? Is this a joke?”—and he became frantic, panicky.

“It’s okay, Jim,” I said soothingly. “It’s just a mistake. Nothing to worry about. Hey!” I took him to the window. “Isn’t this a lovely spring day. See the kids there playing baseball?” He regained his color and started to smile, and I stole away, taking the hateful mirror with me.

And here’s a three-minute film on the making of “The Lost Mariner”: