Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [131]
In academic psychology, new and empirically based research was demonstrating many influences on child development other than those Freud had posited; in clinical psychology, there gushed forth an unending stream of briefer and more practical adaptations of psychoanalysis and of nonanalytic therapies; in psychiatry, in the 1950s and 1960s, tranquilizers and antipsychotic medications were beginning to empty mental hospitals of deeply depressed and moderately schizophrenic patients, and outside the hospitals medication appeared to be far more efficient and quicker than insight-oriented talk therapy.
Psychoanalytic organizations had sought to cast psychoanalysis as a specialty within medicine,* but the American Psychiatric Association rejected or radically revised in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III (1980) and IV (1994) many Freudian-based diagnoses of mental illness. And as mentioned earlier, by the 1980s and 1990s a number of penetrating (but often tendentious) attacks on Freud’s scientific methodology and his personality appeared.
No wonder Time magazine’s cover of November 29, 1993, was a portrait of Freud alongside the boldfaced question “Is Freud Dead?”—the answer apparently being self-evident.
Guess again.
Despite all the valid and invalid attacks on Freudian theory, many of Freud’s ideas have permanently perfused and modified our culture. “The world’s history is the world’s judgment,” said Schiller, and this is surely true in Freud’s case. After all the assaults on his character, the philosophic arguments about his theories, and the laborious efforts to validate or invalidate them, the measure of the man and his ideas is their impact on the history of psychology and on Western civilization. Today, Freud’s enemies and admirers agree, his ideas have permeated Western culture, spawning a host of variant psychotherapies and, more important, profoundly influencing the way artists and writers, legislators, teachers, parents, advertisers, and the majority of literate people think about human nature and themselves. As Fisher and Greenberg said in 1977, “Freud’s theories are now a basic part of our cultural substance,”93 and by any number of objective criteria, that is still undoubtedly so. But we all intuitively know it to be so. We have only to reflect for a moment on how often, and how naturally, we think in terms of Freudian psychology: the sexual symbolism of various objects, the secret (or at least half-secret) hostility of much humor, the unconscious reasons for mistakes and slips of the tongue, the hidden motives in risk taking and self-defeating behavior, the parental role in homosexual development, the everyday effort to look for the “real” reason someone has said or done something we find hard to understand, and on and on. Such ways of thinking pervade everyday life.
These and similar beliefs are based on a larger one: the existence of the dynamic unconscious. It is this which Freud was alluding to when, late in life, he told an admirer, “I am not a great man—I made a great discovery.”94
His great discovery, opening up what had been a vast unexplored area of the mind, permanently enlarged the dimensions and changed the direction of modern psychology, according to the British historian of the field, L. S. Hearnshaw:
[Freud] brought psychologists face to face with the whole range of human problems, with the central questions that had been treated by great thinkers, artists and writers from ancient times, but had been almost excluded from the arid abstractions of the academic schools— with problems of love and hate, of happiness and misery; with the turmoil of social discontent and violence, as well as the trifling errors and slips of everyday existence; with the towering edifices of religious belief as well as the petty, but tragic, tensions of family life.95
Raymond Fancher went even further: