Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [53]
Sigmund Freud himself fell victim to the flawed reasoning of the benevolent-dolphin problem. When his fellow analysts questioned his notion that all men suffer from castration anxiety, he was amused. He wrote: “One hears of analysts who boast that, though they have worked for dozens of years, they have never found a sign of the existence of the castration complex. We must bow our heads in recognition of…[this] piece of virtuosity in the art of overlooking and mistaking.”12 So if analysts see castration anxiety in their patients, Freud was right; and if they fail to see it, they are “overlooking” it, and Freud is still right. Men themselves cannot tell you if they feel castration anxiety, because it’s unconscious, but if they deny that they feel it, they are, of course, in denial.
What a terrific theory! No way for it to be wrong. But that is the very reason that Freud, for all his illuminating observations about civilization and its discontents, was not doing science. For any theory to be scientific, it must be stated in such a way that it can be shown to be false as well as true. If every outcome confirms your hypotheses that all men unconsciously suffer from castration anxiety; or that intelligent design, rather than evolution, accounts for the diversity of species; or that your favorite psychic would accurately have predicted 9/11 if only she hadn’t been taking a shower that morning; or that all dolphins are kind to humans, your beliefs are a matter of faith, not science. Freud, however, saw himself as the consummate scientist. In 1934, the American psychologist Saul Rosenzweig wrote to him, suggesting that Freud subject his psychoanalytic assertions to experimental testing. “The wealth of dependable observations on which these assertions rest make them independent of experimental verification,” Freud replied loftily. “Still, [experiments] can do no harm.” 13
Because of the confirmation bias, however, the “dependable observation” is not dependable. Clinical intuition—”I know it when I see it”—is the end of the conversation to many psychiatrists and psychotherapists, but the start of the conversation to the scientist—”a good observation; but what exactly have you seen, and how do you know you are right?” Observation and intuition, without independent verification, are unreliable guides; like roguish locals misdirecting the tourists, they occasionally send everyone off in the wrong direction.
Some of Freud’s ideas have been empirically supported (the operation of nonconscious processes and defense mechanisms); others, like the bustle and bloomers, simply went out of fashion (penis envy). Although there are few orthodox Freudians anymore, there are many psychodynamic schools of therapy, so called because they derive from Freud’s emphasis on unconscious mental dynamics. And then there are the many unlicensed therapists who don’t know much about psychodynamic theories but nonetheless have uncritically absorbed the Freudian language that permeates the culture—notions of regression, denial, and repression. What unites these clinical practitioners is their misplaced reliance on their own powers of observation and the closed loop it creates. Everything they see confirms what they believe.
One danger of the closed loop is that it makes practitioners vulnerable to logical fallacies. Consider the famous syllogism “All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore Socrates is mortal.” So far, so good. But just because all men are mortal, it does not follow that all mortals are