Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [130]
By now a large body of such studies has accumulated. They vary greatly in methodological soundness, and range widely in scope, testing everything from overarching theory to small and specialized subtheories. This makes it difficult to weigh the cumulative outcome, but a few hardy scholars have sought to do so.
One review of such studies, made some years ago by the psychologists Seymour Fisher and Roger P. Greenberg, focused more on results than on methodological adequacy, and rendered a split decision. Fisher and Greenberg named the following Freudian theories as being well supported: his concepts of the oral and anal character; the etiology of male homosexuality (Freud postulated that a hostile, rejecting father and a close, binding mother so intensify Oedipal rivalry as to inhibit the choice of a female partner); the origin of paranoia as a defense against homosexual impulses; several aspects of Oedipal theory; and as much of dream theory as concerns the dream’s function as an outlet for psychological tension.
They cited as those found faulty the thesis that the dream is a camouflaged unconscious wish, the claim that psychoanalysis is superior to other therapies in the treatment of neurosis, some parts of the Oedipal theory, and many of Freud’s ideas about the female character.
Their summation:
When we add up the totals resulting from our search, balancing the positive against the negative, we find that Freud has fared rather well. But like all theorists, he has proved in the long run to have far from a perfect score. He seems to have been right about a respectable number of issues, but he was also wrong about some important things. If one considers only his formulations concerning men and if, further, one considers only his theoretical propositions…, his record of correct hits is excellent.90
A later review of such studies, the 1981 edition of Paul Kline’s Fact and Fantasy in Freudian Theory, was more inclusive than Fisher and Greenberg’s and, according to Kline, more discriminating, because he drew conclusions only from research with the soundest methodology. Making no effort to appraise such larger Freudian theories as the death instinct and the pleasure principle, which are “metapsychological”— essentially philosophic, and so untestable—Kline found that no fewer than sixteen Freudian concepts have been verified. He summed up as follows:
The objective evidence [provides] some confirmation of a tripartite division of mental activity into ego, super-ego, and id. Developmental theory is supported in that oral erotism [the erotic component in the infant’s oral pleasure], Oedipus and castration complexes appear to occur. Furthermore adult personality patterns like the oral and anal character can be generally observed. There seems no doubt that the defence mechanism repression is commonly used and other defences have been observed. Sexual symbolism is a verified phenomenon both within and outside dreams… [In sum] many of the Freudian concepts most important to psychoanalytic theory have been supported.91
Decline and Fall—and Revival
But by the time these partial confirmations had appeared, the prestige and influence of Freudian psychology and the popularity of psycho-analysis—always limited, to be sure, by its cost, if nothing else—were waning.
Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, a congeries of pervasive social changes and important developments within the behavioral sciences undercut the status of the theory and the elitist appeal of analytic therapy.92
The social developments and protest movements of those decades turned public attention toward broader