Freud's Time has Passed:Replies
Goodheart, Eugene
n am surprised that Frederick Crews acknowledges Freud's suggestiveness and persuasiveness and his brilliant transmutation of late-Romantic literary culture into "science," for nothing in...
...acquire such power that the patient inevitably submits...
...Finally, I should say that I have always admired Crews's work as a literary critic and find it strange that in my first public exchange with him we should find ourselves so at odds...
...The phrase "animus of a resentful renegade" arose from an impression that Crews's excessively fierce and relentless manner made on me...
...He asks us to completely dismiss Freud's ideas about the Oedipus complex, repression, and resistance...
...I explicitly say that it has its limits and is subject to criticism...
...Nothing is left in the wake of his all-out assault...
...I fail to see why interpretation cannot apply to both activities...
...n am surprised that Frederick Crews acknowledges Freud's suggestiveness and persuasiveness and his brilliant transmutation of late-Romantic literary culture into "science," for nothing in his article "The Unknown Freud" (New York Review of Books, November 18, 1993) grants Freud's work any value...
...Truth is not the exclusive property of science, so it doesn't follow that Freud's narrative power and theoretical gifts can't be the source of truths...
...Again Crews's all-or-nothing view undermines or at least seriously compromises the value of what he has to say...
...I am critical of Freud's imperial view that every "no" conceals a "yes," what Crews FALL • 1995 • 531 Arguments characterizes as "the arrogant tails-you-lose logic of Freudian resistance...
...Nowhere do I suggest that "such concepts" as the doctrine of resistance should be removed "from the reach of scientific criticism?' I criticized the imperial version of the doctrine of resistance unequivocally and made no effort to shield or protect it...
...My view of Freud's scientific status is well expressed by Jacques Bouveresse in Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious, a book Crews admires: "What is not so clear is how [Wittgenstein] might determine whether a scientific treatment of the phenomena concerned is possible and under what conditions, or whether, as some would have it, psychoanalysis may not be scientific, but nonetheless constitutes the most scientific, or at any rate the most convincing thing we have, given the nature of the phenomena in question...
...Crews has me choking on this logic...
...How does the doctor (every doctor...
...Crews says I confuse interpretation as an activity "inside a given analysis" with the theoretical "formulation and justification...
...The question of what is truth and where it is to be found is more difficult than Crews's easy scientism recognizes...
...He disparages Freud as a storyteller whose stories have no relation to the truth of our psychological experience...
...Crews exaggerates greatly when he says I enlist Griinbaum as a champion of Freud's extraordinary suggestiveness...
...Incidentally, I don't say that the activity of interpretation is beyond criticism...
...I agree with Crews that Freud's work doesn't meet contemporary standards of scientific achievement...
...If we think of science as a process rather than the embodiment of particular truths that may be superseded, we can regard interpretation as an activity whose value does not depend on a set of particular interpretations it produces...
...I do think Crews's view that every confirmation by an analysand of an interpretation by an analyst is merely an abject assent to the "doctor's illusions" implausible...
...It is true that I know nothing of his motives...
...If all confirming responses are not equally trustworthy, all resistances to interpretation are not to be viewed with suspicion as a sign of repression...
...of psychoanalytic tenets?' (If there is confusion, I share it with Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas...
...Moreover, I would like to know what Crews understands to be scientific truth and its "permanent value...
...All I say is that he acknowledges Freud's heuristic power, and I speculate that Griinbaum's long devotion to a critical study of Freud's work might reflect its extraordinary suggestiveness...
...I was aware of breathing calmly while conducting the critique...
...Nor do I see why my distinction between a particular interpretation and the activity of interpretation is murky...
...I acknowledge in my essay the potential coerciveness of the analyst...
...I don't uncritically endorse the concept of the confirming response of the analysand, as Crews claims...
...And if the doctor has such power, why do certain patients resist to the end...
...In a recent seminar the historian of science Frank Sulloway, who is also critical of Freud's scientific status, admitted that there were no stable truths in science, which was best understood as a process of testing...
...The same could be said for the work of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Tocqueville...
...If Crews has given an account of his evolution elsewhere, I am at fault for not noting it...
Vol. 42 • September 1995 • No. 4
