The Scientific Credibility of Freud's Theories and Therapy
Adelson, Joseph
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "The Scientific Credibility of Freud's Theories and Therapy" establish communication with porpoises. Clearly, open politics requires that everyone—and everything—become involved in the process. The animals have much to teach us about how to live together in...
...He seems to have had little direct experience with the disorder, and drew his inferences from an autobiographical account given by a clinically paranoid jurist, Daniel Paul Schreber...
...Some remarkably inventive research has been carried out in the testing of this hypothesis, almost all of which has confirmed Freud's formulation...
...10) Is the shortage of Natural Philosophy real or contrived...
...and if it is a poor or inadequate design, they will also say so, without any huffing and puffing...
...Well, at least Jeff Berman, her "co-hab" and later husband, told her she was...
...Indeed, if I were a moderately wealthy patron of the Manitoba Conservative Party, I would buy a copy for each party worker and, during the forthcoming electoral campaign, have him copiously quote from these essays...
...At book's end, she was happily enrolled in medical school, gloating at her triumph over a system that had tried to deprive her, and all women, of their basic human right to orgasm...
...Since the book limits itself to studies bearing more or less directly on psychoanalytic therapy, it does not explore the full range of work on therapeutic effectiveness...
...The Kirkus Review "Until recently it never occurred to me that American concern with British economic problems might be self-interested fear of the dreaded Socialism that supposedly ruined Britain...
...The large number is quite unexpected, for several reasons...
...Michael Novak, Commentary "The editor, R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.,...has done a masterful job in gathering superb contributors whose efforts are distinct, overlapping only enough to weave a solid and coherent matrix of British society today...
...Most academic psychologists believe either that it is all nonsense anyway, or that the concepts are too murky to lend themselves to inquiry—that there are, in short, easier paths to fame and fortune than the tortuous work involved in testing the theory...
...They also point out how difficult it is to test some of these ideas...
...B. To compound the problem, in the research literature we find an even wider range of practices subsumed under the rubric "psychoanalysis...
...2. The developmental theory...
...Yet it is stimulating because the essays are pointedly tendentious and full of well-turned ideas with this implication: As Britain has gone, so is the United States headed...
...James Grant Barron's "The book Is depressing because the prognosis for Britain is glum...
...She probably even felt pretty and had stopped fretting about her too-long legs...
...The animals have much to teach us about how to live together in energy-efficient communities, about how to relate to biosphere, about the delicate ecological balance...
...The psychoanalysts themselves, beginning with Freud, have tended to discourage empirical exploration ofanalytic constructs, on the grounds that these are too subtle and entangled to be assayed properly by current methods...
...Robert Conquest Daily Telegraph [London] How You Can Receive a Free Copy of This Book For a limited time only, you can receive a free copy of The Future That Doesn't Work, edited by The American Spectator's R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Box 877, Bloomington, Indiana 47401 Please print Name Address City State Zip X73 The American Spectator January 1978 31 cal device designed to focus attention upon the more central idea that dreams are more than the mere detritus of the psychic life...
...As is well known Freud understood homosexuality as an outcome of a disturbed family relationship...
...To take a fairly simple complication: Even among "orthodox" Freudians we find a substantial heterodoxy in clinical practice...
...Freedom and Dignity will be preserved if sufficient incentives are written into the tax code...
...This idyll came, sadly but inevitably, to an end after several years, and Natasha when last seen had found bliss in the arms of Mr...
...In reading this book's review of the evidence one is taken by the fact that the more concrete, the more measurable the outcome variable, the more impressive the results...
...But the fun wears thin with the realization that these girls were at the end of their adolescence when their tales began...
...When challenged, he took a dogmatic line, and imposed his view of feminine psychology on his followers by sheer force of will and status...
...I understand that this is a $24.95 value for $18.50—a saving of $6.45...
...Despite contributions from Irving Kristol, Samuel Brittan, and our newly-arrived Ambassador, Peter Jay, the book as a whole is not very good...
...Those who meet Freud on their territory—the arts, anthropology, religion, history—and venture no deeper into his thought, are liable to see him as Nabokov did, as a bit of a charlatan...
...Long before Freud became—in Auden's words —a climate of opinion, he was an extraordinary clinical observer, and this book takes us, calmly and patiently, into that astonishing mind...
...It does, however, seem to act as "a vent or outlet for tension and disturbance...
...When, a decade or so later, Davidson felt the need to create a history of the generation that discovered sexual liberation, political morality, and idealistic zeal, she decided to do it in the form of a personal memoir of the three charter members she knew best...
...The Commission believes there is need for much more research...
...Arnold Beichman Christian Science Monitor "Many liberals today have an uneasy conscience about socialism, which as an ideal once seemed to be our best hope for overcoming the harshness of profiteering capitalism and cruel individualism...
...it was—her...
...Two chapters are given over to Freud's writings on psychopathology, specifically to his views on the origins of homosexuality and of paranoia, these being areas where enough empirical work has accumulated to allow an adequate test...
...John Burkhart The Saturday Evening Post "I have trouble indeed deciding which essays to recommend most highly of the nine collected here by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...These problems have made it difficult to provide simple demonstrations of the value of psychoanalysis and of other forms of dynamic psychotherapy...
...Homosexuals perceive their fathers as rejecting, hostile, and neglectful...
...Payment must accompany order The American Spectator, P.O...
...Fisher and Greenberg offer a careful survey of recent research on dreams and dreaming, and conclude that although the dream may sometimes reflect the presence of underlying wishes, it does not do so exclusively...
...Indeed, the authors are able to show, through a careful scrutiny of Freud's entire body of work, that Freud in a sense understood this, that his insistence upon "the wish" alone may have been a rhetori30 The American Spectator January 1978 Early reviews are in: Tyrrell praised & hissed...
...What mistakes have the English made...
...A may represent the rankest heresy for Dr...
...You may remember that Freud ends the second chapter of his great work on the dream with the dramatic sentence: "When the work of interpretation has been completed, we perceive that a dream is the fulfillment of a wish"—the rest of the book being an elaboration of that sentence...
...3. Psychopathology...
...Consider the following: differences in defining what is meant by "change" or "cure" or "improvement," and in measuring these...
...Edward Foote Hartford Courant "Some of the essays in The Future That Doesn't Work offer mere generalizations couched in offensive rhetoric...
...Although the picture of the mother is not quite as clear, a large number of the studies report her being seen as excessively intimate and seductive...
...Other aspects of the inner life, other themes in addition to "wishes," are represented...
...9) Is there a need for further research...
...and of course he was much of the time breathtakingly correct...
...Robin Marris The New Republic "Emmett Tyrrell has brought together a babble of voices stating the obvious....And there is nothing here about the impact of racism on parliamentary democracy...
...Livingston Philadelphia Inquirer "Mr...
...We can Joseph Adelson is professor of psychology and director of the Psychological Clinic at the University of Michigan...
...In New York after college, she landed a job at a suitably fashionable art gallery, lived in a suitably dingy railroad flat, and drifted into a suitably neurotic "relationship" with a famous sculptor, married and twenty years her senior...
...As to the Oedipus complex, Fisher and Greenberg point out correctly that it is not a unified theory, but that it involves several rather distinct elements—among others the child's erotic attachment to and rivalry with the parents, the separate sources of anxiety for boys and girls, the resolution of the complex via identification, and the establishment of the superego...
...In news stories, editorials, syndicated columns, reviews, and reprints, Tyrrell's book has spawned renewed interest in such questions as: What are the effects of social democracy in England...
...The male child —little is as yet understood about lesbianism either clinically or through research—cannot establish a secure relationship with the father, one which will allow him to become masculine through the normal processes of identification...
...18.50—a saving of $6.45...
...Accordingly, we must continue the search for Nothing, so as to find out whether Nothing exists...
...Tyrrell...is to be congratulated on the quality of the contributors...
...Here Freud's observations went seriously awry...
...Barbara Castle The Guardian [Manchester] "The book under review Is a worthy reflection of Mr...
...A somewhat longer answer runs—yes, but apparently no more so than other modes of psychotherapy...
...Yet the value of the account given by Fisher and Greenberg—which I found masterful—is not that it yields these answers...
...I hope most readers will come away from this book with an enhanced appreciation of Freud's clinical genius...
...The short answer is yes—most of the time...
...And it has been seized by British Right-wingers as the life-line they have been waiting for...
...Tyrrell's editorial talents...
...The Commission has concluded that this is far from inevitable...
...For anyone susceptible to vicarious nostalgia, Loose Change might be mild fun: There's nothing like reading about someone else's adolescent trauma...
...Richard H. Amberg, Jr...
...Davidson allows the girls' own voices to color the sections devoted to each of them...
...Natasha, haunted by the sad end of her father—he gave up his ideals to keep her in Jaguars and birth-control pills—eschewed the conventional life and opted for the deeper life of the New York art world...
...Perhaps the most inadequate part of the Oedipal theory is the set of propositions on the girl's development and on feminine psychology in general...
...Each, in its own way, is timely and illuminating....riveting and...deserving of a wide audience...
...Within the last month, making no special effort to find examples, I have come across the following: a radical-feminist tract arguing—if that is the word —the wickedness of psychoanalysis in diverting attention from the authentic enemy, male oppression...
...No one, however, has offered a satisfactory response to Alexander King's inquiry: Is there a life after birth...
...So it comes as a pleasant surprise to see how much work has accumulated nevertheless, and how clever much of it is...
...Hours of rap sessions and self-examination later, Loose Change was born...
...His chief attractions seem to have been a taste for the best foods and wines, the money to buy them, and a saintly patience in the matter of listening to and analyzing Natasha's premonitory dreams...
...There are few problems in the social sciences more difficult to study...
...The shortage is real and not contrived...
...Research psychologists, who have many faults, have one abiding strength: They sometimes design ingenious experiments, and we find in this book some exquisite examples of the craft...
...She was a doctor at heart, one whose mission was to make sure women would be on intimate terms with their bodies...
...The fairness and sobriety of this book is particularly striking given its object of study—psychoanalysis—which, three-quarters of a century since its inception, has lost little of its power to attract abuse and denunciation...
...Please send me a copy of the book only...
...Enclosed is $18, plus fifty cents for postage and handling...
...To be sure he functioned brilliantly in these roles, inventing inter aka psychohistory, psychobiography, psychological anthropology, and new modes of literary analysis...
...There are, it's true, several useful critiques of the welfare state in this book, but for the most part these are sermons to be savored by the choir...
...And, more importantly, they are, by their own account, describing a historic period in human and social development...
...Some of the people she covered for the Boston Globe, for example, were chagrined by their portraits, when all she'd done was to tell the honest truth about them as human beings...
...If you assume—as the Commission did—that there is Something, then it should be a small matter to tote up Everything...
...For example, the authors report two uncontrolled yet compelling studies showing substantial and stable remissions in ulcer and colitis patients...
...We demand sensation—discoveries, however dubious, which will dazzle and titillate...
...What is proper procedure for Dr...
...That's a $24.95 value for just...
...For herself, she worried about her body odor—and Jef sand whether to tell Jeff she'd never had, couldn't have, couldn't even imagine an orgasm...
...8) Is it time to move beyond Freedom and Dignity...
...The weight of the evidence suggests that there is indeed an oral character, marked by tendency to seek approval from others, pessimism, and an orientation towards oral behavior such as overeating, drinking, and smoking...
...Susie's is explicitly obscene...
...BOOK REVIEW The Scientific Credibility of Freud's Theories and Therapy Seymour Fisher and Roger P. Greenberg / Basic Books / $20.00 Joseph Adelson Afew words about the mer- its of this excellent book: It is a balanced, thorough, and fair-minded treatment of its topic...
...1. The dream theory...
...There's no philosophy of British Social Democracy...
...They have tracked down and reviewed all of the available scientific evidence bearing upon Freud's observations and theoretical constructions—the word "scientific" in this case denoting studies which are more than anecdotal, which attempt to follow at least rudimentary rules of system and control...
...The predictions are by no means obvious and, even more to the point, would not have been generated by competing theories of personality...
...Freud's notion of a heightened castration anxiety is also supported, in the sense that for many homosexuals childhood was marked by excessive timidity and trepidation...
...but there must be many general readers like Johnson who are not, and who might learn a thing or two from this book, both about psychoanalysis as a theory and even more about the enormous difficulties one faces in doing "science" on complex psychological processes...
...On the other hand, if there is Something, how can there be Nothing at the same time...
...Sara's is smooth, confident, allusive...
...In general, the authors prefer to see the dream and its imagery not as distinct and singular products of the mind, but rather as continuous with other modes of fantasy...
...assume that the first two of these writers are safely beyond any appeal to reason...
...Three or four of its nine essays are memorable, and none is without merit...
...F.S...
...And we have been getting what we ask for...
...Intellectual audiences have, I suspect, neglected that part 32 The American Spectator January 1978 —that central part—of Freud's work, and have tended to give undue attention to the roles he adopted late in life—as sage, pundit, gelehrter, intellectual adventurer...
...But The Future That Doesn't Work sheds new light on old headlines, from the complicity of the Conservative Party in the present retreat, to the amazing reign of British organized labor, to the welfare state's irresistible growth...
...As the authors tell us: "Therapists, skilled and unskilled, experienced and inexperienced, are regularly given the mission of instilling insight and focusing on transference even though it is apparent that many have conflicting ideas about what they are doing and what they hope to accomplish...
...differences in the skill, experience, and personality of therapists themselves...
...On the whole, Freud's theory of development holds up extremely well...
...Peter McGrath The New Republic "Most of the articles are ill-tempered polemics with all the staying power of yesterday's newspaper....An anthology of repetitive and cranky complaints rather than social criticism...
...In the clinical realm he was sometimes off the mark, but he seems never to have been entirely wrong...
...Natasha's style is pretentious, laden with clumsy imagery...
...The theory of the anal character is also well supported, the authors concluding that "various general measures of anality have proven to be significantly correlated with specific behavioral indices of orderliness, obstinacy, and parsimony...
...And, if there is, is it life as we know it, or is it the kind of life one finds on Mars, viz., life as we do not know it...
...How telling it is that in the midst of the exciting turmoil they worried only about The American Spectator January 1978 33...
...Like Natasha, Susie disdained conventionality: She was a revolutionary at Berkeley...
...month after month every meretricious idea running loose in the Republic somehow finds its way into the pages of Psychology Today...
...Some of the studies reported in this section are particularly impressive, in that they involve predictions from the theory to rather remote realms of behavior, for example, differential predictions as to how oral and anal personalities will react in a conditioning experiment...
...Sara's main problem, as she discovered in college, was that she had no problems...
...As we might expect they discover a considerable range in methodological rigor, yet one of the most appealing qualities of this book is the steadfast refusal of its authors to lecture us about Method and Evidence and all that...
...To turn now to the Fisher/ Greenberg appraisal of the evidence, first warning the reader that what follows is a summary of summaries, hence a somewhat simplified account...
...but the developmental theory is...
...Here is a sampling...
...We further recommend that thefunds previously appropriated for the study of life after death be impounded, it now generally being known that such life exists...
...They considered themselves to be deeply devoted to this great upheaval going on around them...
...That the theory was unsatisfactory was evident almost at once, and at some level Freud seems to have recognized this, given his uncharacteristically querulous defensiveness...
...Yet it was an amateur's brilliance, and he was dead wrong much of the time—wrong about Dostoevsky, about Leonardo, about Ur-history, embarrassingly wrong about such matters as the authorship of Shakespeare's plays...
...Peregrine Worsthorne's discussion of British unions, for example, is a mixture of gross overstatement...and an argument that is dangerously reminiscent—and I use the term advisedly—of fascism...
...The Commission considers it prudent to keep an open mind about where we came from and where we are headed...
...Particularly bedeviling is the issue of why there is Anything instead of Nothing—or whether Everything is in fact Anything, or whether it is really Nothing as some suppose...
...Pride of place goes, in art as in life, to Natasha, whose fey beauty and spirituality won for her a special place in the hearts of all who knew her...
...It seems to have had the desired effect...
...had it done so the positive evidence would certainly have been stronger...
...For this purpose, we recommend an appropriation of $611 million...
...Right—an All-American art dealer with a fourteen-year-old son and a well-stocked kitchen...
...Use the order form below...
...Since Susie was not inclined to bother her pretty little head about things like Naomi Decter is a researcher at Newsweek magazine...
...The substance of the book fits its style perfectly: It is a chronicle of ten years of fashions, passing popular fads, and dull, unsatisfying sexual encounters...
...The result is a not-too-subtle blend of high-school yearbookese and the latest in ladies' clinical, unerotic pornography...
...vast differences in the nature and intensity of clients' problems...
...And her husband was deeply disturbed because she was toohonest to be able to give him the kind of devoted, unswerving moral support he gave her...
...Louis Globe-Democrat "If you really care about your own freedom, if you sense it is being threatened, if you would like to sharpen your perception about what is happening and where we are heading, you will find this book a high-yielding investment...
...She was a revolutionary, only the oppressed class here wasn't the working class or students or even blacks...
...You could say that her greatest problem in that period of her life was her honesty...
...An abundance of research is available, rather too much to summarize here—e.g., 17 pages are given over to a table abstracting studies of the oral phase alone...
...Together they have the virtue of concentrating attention upon a single, recent national experience which, rather than constituting a model for America to follow, seems rather to offer an example to be avoided...
...Steven Kelman, The New Leader The Foreign Press "The Future That Doesn't Work, sired in America, is the most serious bid since the war to turn the tide of political thought back to the private enterprise dream...
...But the book is necessary because, though Social Democratic philosophy may be innocuous, the results of its application are not...
...It has been something of an embarrassment ever since...
...You can receive both the magazine and the book, for the price of the magazine alone, plus fifty cents for postage and handling...
...The result Is a minor masterpiece for scholars and the general public alike...
...and a well-controlled research demonstrating that persons who have undergone psychotherapy are less likely to suffer serious medical problems in later years...
...In both instances the research supports the theory...
...Frank Johnson Sunday Telegraph [London] "[Irving Kristol's essay is] one of the most Important political articles I have ever read...
...William Murchison Dallas Morning News The American Press — Indignation "...nine essays in Anglo-American pessimism....This is familiar stuff, rather more interesting in the realm of democratic theory than in the world of policy...
...Fisher and Greenberg are also persuaded that there is no sharp distinction between the "manifest" and "latent" layers of the dream, as Freud proposed, and that the dream is not designed to preserve sleep...
...Enclosed is $6.95, plus fifty cents for postage and handling, for a total of $7.45...
...4. Psychotherapy...
...Recognizing this, research psychologists have put a great deal of their effort into the study of developmental topics—the theory of oral and anal constellations, the Oedipus complex, the achievement of sexual identity, the growth of conscience...
...This tone—amiable but firm —is in marked contrast with what we find in many previous surveys of psychoanalysis, e.g., those composed—more or less annually—by the egregious and unreliable Professor H. J. Eysenck...
...If a study is well-designed, and its findings therefore deserve special attention, they will say so...
...It is most clear, to cite one example, that men tend to be susceptible to castration anxiety (and its derivatives) and women to fear of loss of love...
...The chapter which reports the paranoia studies is a particularly exciting one to read, in that the brilliance of the theory ismatched by the ingenuity of many of the investigations...
...Just enter a new subscription for two years—or extend your current subscription for two years—and we'll send you a free copy of this important book...
...0 BOOK REVIEW Loose Change: Three Women of the Sixties Sara Davidson / Doubleday / $9.50 Naomi Decter Sara Davidson, Susie Hersh Berman, and Natasha Taylor were sorority sisters at Berkeley in the early sixties...
...Furthermore there is some suggestive evidence linking anality to the intensity of anal attitudes in the mother...
...and this absence of neat proofs has led at times to a yahoo cynicism, among some psychologists, about any and all psychodynamic approaches to treatment...
...Fisher and Greenberg have been able to locate—by a rough count-2,400 references, many of these obscure, some of them unpublished doctoral dissertations...
...an advertisement for a new book by a clinical psychologist who, it is said, has made a "surprising discovery of affinity between Freud's psychological system and world view and those of satanists, witches and moral nihilists, and other disturbed nonconformists...
...it is rather in the lucid, painstaking way it shows us why these and other answers are so hard to achieve...
...Yet to the degree that they can be tested, the theory as a whole stands up well...
...Her honesty, thus, made enemies, broke up her marriage, and caused a decline in her career...
...Despite its importance in the history of psychoanalysis, the dream theory is not really vital to the system itself...
...To my surprise, this fear is the underlying theme that unifies a well-received recent American collection of essays on le mal anglais called The Future That Doesn't Work, edited by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...The Commission believes that adequate supplies of Natural Philosophy can be made available for the winter if the price of Natural Philosophy is decontrolled at the godhead...
...Published just seven months ago, The Future That Doesn't Work: Social Democracy's Failures in Britain has already generated spirited and widespread discussion in the press...
...Cheers also for Doubleday for publishing so valuable a collection of essays at an unusually low price...
...Freud's theory of the origins of paranoia is a spectacular example of his at times uncanny grasp of psychodynamics...
...Ronald Butt The Times [London] "There is something a little incongruous about the ten excellent contributions to The Future That Doesn't Work, which expends so much intellectual flak painstakingly blowing to bits a 'philosophy' which is little better than a racket...
...After years of searching—at Berkeley, in communes in the west, in an adobe hut in New Mexico, and even in Vietnam—she finally found her identity...
...Sara never had a real orgasm problem Of course, she didn't always have them, but often enough that she could say with a fair amount of certainty that she'd overcome the guilt instilled in her by her mother...
...Freud was able to perceive that Schreber's rather baroque delusions, seemingly little more than the incoherences of a madman, were dominated by an inner logic: They were the expression of the writer's struggle against disavowed homosexual wishes...
...Only by getting it out in the open—by exploring the reason for this unflinching honesty—could she really deal with her past and get on with the future...
...The present volume is especially useful at such a moment, when new questions have arisen about the historical program of social democracy...
...The American Press — Praise "The 'English disease' is nothing new to Americans, of course, who read of its depredations daily and, increasingly, suffer its symptoms on a firsthand basis...
...After she divorced Jeff and got liberated, though, when she was finally allowed to have her own ideas, she found that he had been right all along...
...Should Freud's account of the child's experience turn out to be seriously flawed, very little would be left...
...Most of the studies which have been done confirm these observations...
...What lessons can Americans learn from the British experience...
...Nevertheless we have had a slow but striking growth of positive findings...
...and a new book by Paul Johnson (whose recent history of Christianity I rather admired) offering some cranky and ill-informed opinions contrasting Freud's doctrine with a figment of the imagination called "true science...
...Yet to say so will not help the publisher sell many copies, since these are Apollonian virtues in what has become a Dionysian age in psychology...
...There was praise and there was indignation...
...SUPPLIES ARE LIMITED—SEND YOUR ORDER TODAY ^ Please send me a copy of The Future That Doesn't Work, and enter a ^ new subscription ^ renewal of my current subscription for two years...
...Through the years of student unrest—and graduate and post-graduate student unrest—Jeff taught her right thinking about who should own what, who should kill whom, whether the revolution should come now or later, and who should carry it out...
...On the other hand there are some genuine difficulties in the theory of identification and a great deal of confusion regarding sex differences in the sense of guilt...
...Almost one-third of this book is devoted to the question most likely to interest the general reader: Does psychoanalysis work as a treatment...
...The book provides, if nothing else, three striking portraits of the flower of our youth...
...J.A...
...He focused upon penis-envy as a universal and definitive event in the formation of feminine character, a choice which in turn led to both a simplified and distorted view of the girl's psychological growth...
...ideas, she took his word for it...
...The writing of this book was undertaken as a cathartic measure...
...The greatest honesty problem, however, was professional: When she finally decided to abandon the slick and clever tone that had earned her such a reputation as a journalist and to do an honest piece about something she cared passionately about, Esquire, the Atlantic, and Harper's were not impressed...
...This heterogeneity of practice is only one of a number of sources of variation...
...by the time the book was finished, Sara was feeling better about the world and looking ahead with a more hopeful eye...
...Hadn't she been denied an understanding of the physical functioning of her very own body —and thus denied orgasm—to say nothing of the freedom to think...
...What Fisher and Greenberg have done may seem to be simplicity itself...
...Once she left college and started making it in the world of journalism, however, she began to encounter them...
...Manor, Winnipeg Free Press "It is almost a textbook of the new intellectual movement against social democracy...
...Each in her own way helped to form and was formed by the social "revolution" of the 1960s...
Vol. 11 • January 1978 • No. 3
