Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [104]
When the American Psychological Association celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary in 1977, the opening speaker, David Krech, spoke of William James as “our father who begat us.” Referring to the past three quarters of a century of work on questions James had raised, Krech said, “Even if I were to total up all advances in gains and achievements and multiply them by a factor of hope, the total would still not suffice as an adequate tribute to lay at James’s feet.”66
SEVEN
Explorer of the Depths:
Sigmund Freud
The Truth About Freud
More than any other figure in the annals of psychology, Sigmund Freud has been both extravagantly praised and savagely castigated for his theories, venerated and condemned as a person, and regarded as a great scientist, a cult leader, and a fraud. His admirers and critics agree that his impact on psychology, the psychotherapies, and the way human beings in Western society think about themselves has been larger than that of anyone else in the history of the science; for the rest, they seem to be talking about different people and different bodies of knowledge.
The sociologist and Freud scholar Philip Rieff said in 1959 that “the greatness of the man is beyond question, complementing the greatness of his mind,” and rated his writing “perhaps the most important body of thought committed to paper in the twentieth century.” But several years later a well-known scholar and humanities professor, Erich Heller, asserted in the Times Literary Supplement that Freud was one of the most overrated figures of our time, and Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Medawar called psychoanalytic theory “the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the century.”
The political scientist Paul Roazen judged Freud to be “unquestionably one of the greatest psychologists of history” and “a great thinker,” and the theologian Paul Tillich considered him “the most profound of all the depth psychologists.” But an English scholar, E. M. Thornton, gathered up bits of evidence that, in her opinion, prove “that [Freud’s] central postulate, the ‘unconscious mind,’ does not exist, that his theories were baseless and aberrational,” that he formulated them while under the influence of cocaine, and that he was “a false and faithless prophet.”
Freud’s admirers, including the historian Peter Gay, author of a massive 1988 biography, see him as a brave and heroic fighter for truth. His detractors see him as a neurotic and ambitious egotist who sought notice by propounding fantastic theories. In two lengthy diatribes in The New York Review of Books in 1993 and 1994, and later in other writings, Frederick Crews, a professor of English literature, established himself as perhaps the most savage of the many Freud bashers, saying that as a therapy psychoanalysis is “indifferently successful” and “vastly inefficient”; that as an empirical approach to scientific knowledge it is “fatally contaminated” by assuming, in dialogue with patients, the very ideas it seeks to corroborate; that Freud himself was “indifferent to his patients’ suffering” and that they achieved only mediocre or negative therapeutic results; that he often sought to “nail” the patient “with hastily conceived interpretations which he then drove home unabatingly”; and so on and on.
Most historians of psychology credit Freud with a long string of influential discoveries, the most noteworthy being that of the dynamic unconscious. But Frank Sulloway, a historian of science, has learnedly argued that Freud’s concepts were largely “creative transformations” of ideas already extant in neurology and biology, and the scholar Henri Ellenberger has painstakingly made the case that Freud’s discovery of the dynamic unconscious merely crystallized and gave shape to diffuse ideas that had already been put forward by many of his predecessors and contemporaries.
Freud saw himself, and most of his biographers have seen