Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [129]
Displacement directs repressed feelings toward an acceptable substitute. A woman with an unduly strong attachment to her father may choose a man his age as a husband. A man who has buried his fierce anger at his controlling father may become a chronic rebel, fighting with all sorts of authority figures.
Intellectualization fends off anxiety by taking an ostensibly intellectual interest in an impermissible desire, a painful loss, or the like. A person with repressed sadistic impulses may become a social scientist specializing in the study of sadists or torturers. Freud’s contemporary Havelock Ellis, though sexually inhibited during most of his life, wrote a mass of scholarly studies of normal and abnormal forms of sexual behavior.
Projection, a very common defense mechanism, is the attributing of one’s own unacceptable impulses to the object of those impulses. People who deny feeling racial hatred may believe that persons of the other race hate them, or attribute to the others the impulses they deny in themselves, as in the case of Ku Klux Klan members who see blacks as vicious and sexually animalistic.
Sublimation, finally, is the most prosocial of the defense mechanisms; by means of it, superego and ego transmute the instinctual demand into some socially valuable related activity. Painting is often a sublimation of the childish impulse to smear or handle feces; writing or performing, sublimations of the impulse to exhibit oneself; surgery, a noble transformation of the urge to do harm; and most athletic games (and such nonathletic ones as chess), acceptable and enjoyable sublimations of aggression.
But Is It Scientific?
Ever since Freud began publishing his ideas, his psychology has been fiercely attacked on one ground or another. At first and for some decades many physicians and psychologists called it dirty and perverted; by the 1930s communist theorists were castigating it as decadent and bourgeois; and in the same decade the Nazis condemned it as Jewish filth and burned Freud’s books.
Psychoanalysis outlived these assaults, but for many years it has been under attack of a more thoughtful kind: A number of psychologists and philosophers of science have asserted that it is not scientific. Their chief argument is that psychoanalytic research is not experimental; the psychoanalyst does not construct a situation in which he or she can control variables and manipulate them one at a time to measure their impact and so establish causal connections.
Experimentation, however, is not the only way to do science; induction from observation is another. Having perceived a pattern in a mass of data, the scientist hypothesizes about its cause, then tests the supposition by looking at more examples. If they too fit the hypothesis, it is strengthened; if they fail to, it is weakened. It is this method that is the basis of psychoanalytic research.
But the evidence so gathered, says the philosopher Adolf Grünbaum, is weak. For one thing, the observations that reveal a pattern have a “shared contaminant”—the analyst’s influence. After the analyst offers an interpretation of some piece of behavior, for instance, the patient may dutifully come up with a confirming memory (which may in fact be imaginary).88 For another, when free association is used to investigate such different areas as neurotic symptoms, dreams, and parapraxes, the agreement among the data may be the result of using a single method to explore different phenomena rather than a genuine concurrence of the findings.
Grünbaum says that this does not warrant the conclusion that psychoanalysis is unverifiable; rather, it indicates that verification of its theories must come from well-designed extra clinical studies, either epidemiological or even experimental.89
Many efforts toward that end have, in fact, been made. Some have involved laboratory experiments in which volunteers are subjected to a stimulus that, according to Freudian theory, should yield a particular result. Others,