Freud's Time has Passed
Crews, Frederick
Eugene Goodheart is a fine literary critic, but in "Freud on Trial" (Spring 1995) he fails to establish that Freud's undoubted "suggestiveness" and "persuasiveness" are grounds for his permanent...
...And when he character530 • DISSENT Arguments izes my criticism of Freud as parricidal, he is putting into play the very habit of Oedipal reductionism that I, among others, have called into question...
...Yet Goodheart wants to remove such concepts from the reach of scientific criticism, appealing instead to spongily supportive categories like "the power of narration," "the company of the great masters of modern literature," and the "emotional recognition of the truth of an interpretation" as it is reflected in "the confirming response of the analysand...
...But a sound explanation, such as Ernest Gellner's thoughtful and complex one in The Psychoanalytic Movement, or The Coming of Unreason (1985)—won't necessarily require our continued enthrallment to such debatable notions as repression and the Oedipus complex...
...But Goodheart's other cited means of confirmation are no stronger...
...As Goodheart says, the fact that Freud has served our century as a major "founder of discursivity" needs to be explained...
...Finally, Goodheart's remarks about me personally are all erroneous or beg the question...
...Goodheart is most confused of all, however, when he seeks to shield psychoanalysis behind "interpretation," an activity that "is not scientific explanation" and is therefore subject to criticism only when insistence is laid on "a particular interpretation, rather than the activity of interpretation itself...
...I have not hidden my "evolution from champion of psychoanalysis to implacable adversary" but have frequently recounted it in print...
...If Freud has "influenced" us without the benefit of being right in his mental lawgiving, attention must shift from the absolute appeal of his ideas to the modern cultural needs and expectations they have served...
...And the resonance of Freud's ideas with modern literature only reminds us that, while cunningly posing as a mere clinical drudge, Freud steeped himself in lateRomantic literary culture and brilliantly transmuted its preoccupations into "science...
...Even Goodheart chokes, for example, on the arrogant tails-you-lose logic of Freudian "resistance," which allows interpretive folly an unchecked license...
...Eugene Goodheart is a fine literary critic, but in "Freud on Trial" (Spring 1995) he fails to establish that Freud's undoubted "suggestiveness" and "persuasiveness" are grounds for his permanent value as a psychological thinker...
...This is almost too murky to unpack, but one point stands out: Goodheart has confounded the interpretive activity inside a given analysis with the formulation and justification of ambitious psychoanalytic tenets...
...In a word, clients in every form of therapy amply "confirm" their doctors' illusions...
...Goodheart's weakness for this last form of corroboration demonstrates that he has learned nothing from Adolf Griinbaum, whom he imprudently enlists as a champion of Freud's "extraordinary suggestiveness...
...Freud's propositions fall squarely within the domain of psychology, and no amount of interpreting that employs those propositions can exempt them from the scrutiny awaiting every psychological system—even if its founder should turn out to have status as "the commanding figure of our culture...
...Ordinarily a fair and careful thinker, Goodheart in this essay has played the ad hominem card: if Crews is driven by "iconoclasm" and "the animus of a resentful renegade," his arguments can be dismissed out of hand...
...One inconvenience in Goodheart's argument is that Freud is becoming less persuasive with every passing year...
...Indeed, only when we have grasped (as Gellner does) the gratuitousness of those and other Freudian dogmas can we transcend Whiggish smugness and perceive (as Goodheart doesn't) the full scope of the problem...
...Freud's formidable narrative power argues for his place not among discoverers of truth but, obviously, among fellow storytellers...
...I would respectfully suggest to Goodheart, whom I have never met, that he knows nothing whatever about my motives, just as I know nothing of his in belittling my efforts to tell the truth about Freud and psychoanalysis...
...I have "taken into consideration," again in print, all of the issues that Goodheart accuses me of evading...
Vol. 42 • September 1995 • No. 4
