Skeptical Engagements

...soup, how is it that all the available fossil evidence records only forward leaps so great that they can hardly be said to be evolutionary...

...Crews begins by discussing what one may gather from anyone who has spent ten or fifteen years in analysis: the record of classic Freudian therapy as a curative for neurotic disorders is atrocious...

...In their case, the damage has not been significant, since it is possible to make good art around a bad theory...

...For although there is much internal bickering among the professional elites who claim descent from either Darwin or Freud, they tend to close ranks when confronted with objections from the outside...

...In his brilliant The Ordeal of Civility, Cuddihy sees Freudian psychology, as well as Marxism, as a working out of the grievances of the newly emancipated Jews in the nineteenth century...

...Freud is the presiding genius of modern secular culture, which decrees that the purpose of life is not salvation, but "self-realization...

...Some of Macbeth's points about Darwin were made over fifty years ago by that paragon of common sense, G. K. Chesterton, who also pointed out why psychoanalysis and anthropology were profoundly mistaken in their assumption that human behavior can be explained scientifically...

...According to Crews, who must have extraordinary stamina to have bushwhacked through the prose of people like Derrida, Habermas, and Ahhusser, both Marxism and psychoanalysis are now presented by the academic vanguard as nonscientific, so that they can "be absolved from empirical scrutiny and employed for utopian speculative ends...

...Freud, it turns out, was not above stealing other people's ideas or lying about his cures or violating his Hippocratic oath by inflicting extreme and gratuitous pain on his patients or prescribing massive doses of a dangerous drug (Freud was the original Cocaine Cowboy) or embracing every quack biological theory which circulated in the late nineteenth century...

...Just talking to someone has its therapeutic value, for example...

...And when stacked up against the scores of other therapies that are available, psychoanalysis makes a dismal showing, even though it is by far the most expensive and time-consuming of any treatment...

...And here, as we learn from Frederick Crews in several powerful essays in this new collection, Skeptical Engagements, we run into grave trouble...

...Freudian psychology, like Marxism, provides the initiated with a totalist vision of human behavior which is both neatly reductive and profoundly inimical to traditional values...

...The only reply one can infer from this book is, "Why, democracy and pluralism...

...Freud and Mead, we now know, both approached their subjects with self-fulfilling assumptions and dubious methodologies...

...but they were careful to wrap their reckless speculations in a cloak of scientific prudence...

...The arguments are perforce more subtle, the mustered evidence less accessible to the newspaper-reading public...

...The "ordeal" of assimilation, according to Cuddihy, was internalized in the ferocious bourgeois-bashing systems of these two thinkers...

...Where, for that matter, is the Ur-cat that, according to Darwinian theory, later differentiated itself into lions, tigers, and ocelots...

...The professoriat's trafficking in nihilism is an ominous phenomenon, and critics like Crews perform a valuable service by monitoring it with such insight and intelligence...

...Macbeth published a little book called Darwin Retried which caused a disturbance among the professionals who ponder such matters at places like the Museum of Natural History in New York...

...Embarrassed by events, by the fact that not a single one of Marx's major prophecies has come true, Marxists have retreated from the streets into the academy where, immune to history's messy contingencies, 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 they have been able to vaporize Marx's teachings into a diffuse aesthetic atmosphere in which bits of opaque jargon float like shimmering motes...

...Most "Freudian" analysts have to some extent put Freud behind them...

...But unfortunately, Freudian psychology, like Marxism, has a praxis...

...The debunking of Darwin and Freud is running along altogether different lines...

...Crews, however, is not interested in these later refinements...

...But one puts down this collection of essays with the same question one has for every critic whose main enterprise is poking holes in other people's logic: What exactly do you believe in...

...When it works at all, it is primarily among the relatively healthy and affluent, and, as Crews points out, there are other plausible explanations than Freud's for "successful...

...Like other faiths, Freudianism readily rebounds when confronted with seemingly fatal objections, for it is inseparable from its believer's private sense of spiritual vitality and worth...

...What interestshim is the corruption of the high pure source—the questionable way Freud went about concocting such theories as the Oedipal Complex and the sexual etiology of neurosis and how these theories managed to permeate modern thought even though there is not a shred of evidence that they are true...

...This takes nothing away from the marvelous pointilist works of Signac...

...But in order to survive, democracy and pluralism require more from their defenders than simply "skeptical engagements" with their adversaries...

...An American litigation lawyer named Norman Macbeth, for example, decided in the course of some vacation reading several years ago that Darwin's theory of evolution did not add up...

...The widespread acceptance of Freud was in part accomplished by the careful crafting of the Master's public image by his disciples...

...Crews, who began as an old-fashioned literary critic, wields a brilliant forensic style, and these essays are an excellent place to start for anyone interested in the current dismantling of Freudian edifice...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 49...

...Writers like Stefan Zweig, Ernest Jones, and Philip Rieff presented their mentor as a man of towering professional integrity and unimpeachable private morals...

...He readily gives credit to some who preceded him, like Adolf Griinbaum, while slighting the groundwork of others, like John Murray Cuddihy, whose exposures of Freud have been based more on cultural and literary, rather than empirical, evidence...

...Nevertheless, Freud's essays and Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa have long been accepted as works of scientific merit, rather than for what they SKEPTICAL ENGAGEMENTS Frederick Crews/Oxford University Press/$19.95 George Sim Johnston THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1987 47 are: inspired prose poems containing a great deal of nonsense and an occasional passing insight...

...Marxism was hit by the proverbial freight-train of history...

...Where is the "missing link" between, say, reptile and mammal...

...Moreover, increasingly sophisticated methods of diagnosis and the efficacious use of drugs as a palliative (not a curative) have made clinical psychology more useful than in the past...

...I am told by one analyst that there are few strict constructionists around anymore...

...One would like to dismiss this nonsense as,in Crews's words, a "sandbox amusement for the ultrasophisticated," but unfortunately history shows that the intellectual onanism of the few can have dire consequences for the many...

...cases...

...No matter what our predisposition toward the Viennese doctor, we all to some extent think in the categories he devised...

...Crews presents the available evidence...

...In the field of literary criticism, this Marxistical dispensation has brought about the methodology known as deconstructionism, a corrosive solvent which can be applied to any literary text to remove from it any trace of 2,500 years of Western culture...

...As Tom Bethell pointed out in Harper's, there is now a significant contingent in the field of systematics—which involves the taxonomy of species—which believes that those evolutionary charts in every high school textbook illustrate, at best, an unlikely hypothesis...

...C yews, of course, is only one of a number of intelligent critics to launch an unabashedly empirical assault against Freud in the past decade or so...

...Margaret Mead was a minor blip onthe cultural radar compared to Sigmund Freud...

...And does Darwin really explain how a highly complex organ like an eye could simply just appear—by biological freak and in a state developed enough to prove its survival value—on some slippery creature feeling its way around the muck...

...And yet even a thinker of the caliber of Lionel Trilling took Freud as a kind of intellectual demi-god whose integrity was never to be questioned...

...Some of the impressionists believed in an atomistic theory of light which was later proved to be entirely false...

...only a few lingering ideologues are blind to the practical consequences of the doctrine...

...It is meant to change things...

...If the higher organisms evolved one small step at a time from the primordial George Sim Johnston is a writer living in New York...

...In the second section of his book, Crews moves from Freud to the current state of Marxism...

...There has not been anything so spectacular as the Gulag and the Cambodian genocide to brush all doubt aside...

...Also, while the most important witnesses against Marxism were people who were once on the inside, like Solzhenitsyn, the demolition of Darwin and Freud has been more the work of inspired amateurs operating outside the priesthood...

...Freud, in fact, thought that Marxism's desire to abolish private property was based on a profound misreading of human nature...

...For this reason, Freud has long been a darling of the intellectual left, even though his conclusions about human nature were deeply pessimistic and anti-utopian...

...Artists and writers have concocted entire oeuvres around his speculations...

...C rews's discussion of Freud's unsound methods is devastating, as is his discussion of the resistance of both analysts and intellectuals to the mounting empirical evidence against Freud's theories: ". . psychoanalysis shows every sign of being not just a method and a psychology but also a faith, with all that this implies about psychic immunity from rationally based criticism...

...Crews's dismissal of psychoanalysis is cogent, if somewhat cavalier...

...I f the major intellectual event of the 1 seventies was the death of old-fashioned political Marxism, the epochal event of the eighties is the disembowelment of Darwin and Freud—the two other members of the trinity which rules over the modern mind...

...We now know—no thanks to the psychoanalytic bodyguard around the archival remains—that Freud was dark, ruthless, and dishonest...