Sigmund Freud was a famous neurologist, popularly known as the father of psychology. Thanks to his teachings in the late 1850s, people have spent thousands of dollars to sit on a couch and tell a complete stranger how they really feel about their mother – and why it strangely turns them on.

In 1971, Penthouse magazine explored Freud’s theories and debated whether or not he truly deserved to be credited as the O.G. of sex. In a world where Kim Kardashian is more famous than Hilary Clinton and there are websites called How To Make Me Come, the issue of how our minds affect our bodies is more relevant today than ever.

You decide: was Freud a brilliant man far ahead of his time or just another sex-obsessed nut job with mommy issues?

The Big Three: Freud, Einstein, Marx

When I was a student, intellectual life in Europe and the USA was dominated by three gigantic figures, who seemed to have captured the imagination of the man in the street as much as that of their professional fellows. In physics, there was Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity was becoming universally known in a rather popularized form. In economics and sociology, there was Karl Marx, whose doctrine of the class struggle had just produced the Russian revolution (or at least was thought to have done so—a rather subtle difference). In psychology there was Sigmund Freud, whose very name had for many people become synonymous with the subject.

All three, by a remarkable coincidence, were German-speaking, and all three were Jews. English was then becoming the most widely known and spoken language, taking over from French, and Jews made up perhaps 1 percent of the number of people who might have made a significant contribution to these three areas, so the probability of all three top figures coming from such a small minority was negligible. Jews, of course, have always had a reputation for original, speculative thinking, and possibly the persecution and repression they experienced may have acted as a strong additional motivation force; certainly all three showed ample evidence of originality and of highly speculative thinking, and their fame is in direct proportion to these qualities. How have they fared since then?

Einstein is still the undisputed successor to Newton. Here and there his insistence that "God does not play tricks," and his reluctance to accept a purely statistical interpretation of physical reality is regarded as a trifle old fashioned, endearing but still not quite "with it"; nevertheless, his fame is firmly anchored in his achievements. Marx's historical importance is recognized by everyone, as is his very real contribution to sociology and to economics. However, this contribution is now seen as much less "scientific" than he thought, or his followers like to make out. An important figure, no doubt, but not in the same class as Einstein.

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Freud Goes Down

Of the three, it is Freud who has fared least well. His theory is now seen as being not much wrong as unscientific, in the sense that it does not give rise to testable predictions. As logicians and philosophers of science have pointed out, if you cannot falsify a theory by experimental means, then that theory is not really saying anything. Even worse, the methods of treatment which Freud based on his theory—at one time thought to have opened a way to the abolition of neurotic and other mental disorders—are now found to be almost completely ineffective. Among scientists, his stature has much diminished, though again his historical importance as a prophet of social change can hardly be doubted. Freud deduced from his theories that psychoanalysis would meet a strong and virulent resistance. In fact, it was accepted much more readily, more widely, and more uncritically than almost any other set of comparable revolutionary ideas. In psychiatry, it has become the leading school—to such an extent that it is almost impossible to obtain a leading post in some countries (particularly the US), either in academic life or private practice, without having undergone a training analysis and thus been exposed to an efficient form of "brainwashing." Similarly, among novelists, filmmakers, journalists, teachers, philosophers, and even among the general public, psychoanalysis is almost the only type of psychology at all well known—indeed to most people psychoanalysis is psychology. Even cartoonists have joined in this chorus of agreement, to the extent that "the psychoanalysis joke" has become as much of a standby in London's Punch as in The New Yorker.

Nevertheless, there is still a hard core of unbelievers, to whom the whole story of psychoanalysis is little but a repetition of the famous fairytale about the Emperor's new clothes. These dissenters tend to be found mostly among those who have been trained in scientific methods and have adopted psychology as their profession. Few experimental psychologists or leading psychological theoreticians accept the Freudian doctrine, and the majority tend to regard it as so much beyond the pale that they do not even consider it necessary to discuss and argue its pretensions. We thus have the curious situation where psychoanalysis is widely accepted among lay people and others untrained in psychology, ignorant of experimental methods and incapable of evaluating empirical evidence, but widely rejected by those knowledgeable in psychology, experienced in experimental methodology and well able to evaluate empirical findings. The most obvious hypothesis suggested by this state of affairs would seem to be that psychoanalysis is a myth; a set of semi-religious beliefs disseminated by a group of people who should be regarded as prophets rather than scientists. It will be the purpose of this article to investigate to what extent this hypothesis may contain seeds of truth, and to what extent it may be a mischievous caricature.

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Does Psychoanalysis Actually Work?

A good way into such an inquiry is to look at the evidence regarding the effects of psychotherapy. Most people are interested in psychoanalysis because they believe that it is a method of treatment which actually cures neurotic and other disorders of the mind. If it did not do that, their interest in the academic disputes swirling around the psychoanalytic theory would be greatly diminished. Freud himself was much more interested in psychoanalysis as a general philosophy, as a method of discovering new facts about people, and as a way into the unconscious. He played down its curative powers, and indeed became very pessimistic about "cures" towards the end of his life. But his followers did not follow him in this; they kept on insisting that psychoanalysis was not only the best method of treatment, but the only one with any hope of permanent success. This belief was tied up with certain theoretical preconceptions. To the psychoanalyst, neurotic symptoms are merely the observable signs of underlying complexes, repressed into the unconscious but too strong to remain completely suppressed. These complexes date back to childhood years and are associated with the Oedipus complex which is their fons et origo. Treatment consists of uncovering the original infantile experience which laid the basis for the later neurosis.

This type of treatment has now been going on for some 60 years, and many thousands of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have been practicing it on practically all the civilized countries of the world. One would imagine that after all this time some definite knowledge would have accumulated about the effectiveness of such psychotherapy. This, it is surprising to report, is not so. Psychoanalysts have always been eager to hide their light under a bushel as far as evidence of the success or otherwise of their treatment is concerned. This habit contrasts rather sharply with the impression, given wittingly or unwittingly by psychoanalysts, that their method is the only one which gives positive and lasting results in this field. What psychoanalysts have usually has been to publish individual cases, almost invariably cases in which the patient got better, and to argue from these illustrative examples to the general case. The argument may be formally stated in a way that exposes it as one of the classic examples of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. The fact that a patient, John Doe, suffering from a phobia, gets better four years after psychoanalytic treatment has been initiated is not proof that John Doe has got better because of such psychoanalytic treatment; and to reason thus, even by implication, is so obviously absurd that I will not waste space by arguing the case. There is no method of treatment, from prayer to giving neurotics cold baths, and from hypnosis to extracting their teeth in order to eliminate septic foci, which has not been given rise to claims similar to those of psychoanalysis, and which has not published clamorous and lengthy accounts of "cures" so accomplished.

Clearly the assessment of therapeutic claims in this field is complex and difficult and requires a certain degree of sophistication. The most obvious difficulty is what is sometimes called spontaneous remission. Neurotic disorders often clear up without any formal treatment of any kind; indeed this is true of the majority of cases. They also clear up after types of treatment which are completely non-specific and which, according to the psychoanalysts, should have no effect at all. A particularly good example is the famous study by Denker of 500 severe neurotics who had complete disability pensions because of their neuroses. Not only did these 500 fail to receive any kind of psychoanalytic treatment; they were also, because of their pensions, highly motivated to retain their illness. Nevertheless, some two out of three completely recovered within two years, having had no other treatment than the usual pink pills and pep talks of their GPs. After five years, the percentage of recoveries rose to some 90 percent. Many other studies give rise to similar conclusions, to wit that neurotic disorders are generally of a self-terminating kind and, however severe, are not likely to last for more than two or three years even when left untreated, or when treated by people with no training in psychiatry or psychoanalysis.

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Therapy for the One Percent?

To prove its efficacy, psychoanalysis would clearly have to do better than this. If people treated by psychoanalysis did not recover more quickly or in greater numbers than when left untreated, then clearly the curative claims of psychoanalysis would have to be rejected. Actually, one might anticipate a positive showing for psychoanalysis even though the method was not in fact efficacious. The reasons for this are that psychoanalysts, by and large, only treat the better-off and more intelligent types of patient and, furthermore, they tend to select their patients stringently in terms of likelihood to benefit from treatment. So their patients should have a better recovery rate than the more unselected groups on which the spontaneous recovery baseline was established.

Yet the data suggest strongly that if anything, patients treated by psychoanalysis take longer to recover and recover to a lesser extent than do patients left untreated. This conclusion is arrived at by averaging the claims made by various psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic institutions with respect to their patients. These claims are taken at face value, though there is the ever-present danger that each analyst would be prejudiced in favor of his own successes, thus giving a more optimistic view than would be warranted had an independent examination been made of the patients.

Such an actuarial comparison is, of course, defective from many points of view. It is difficult to be certain that the persons in the various groups are suffering from equally serious disorders; and it is difficult to be sure that the criteria of "cure" and "recovery" used by different people are identical. Still, on no account can the figures be interpreted to give any support whatsoever for psychoanalytic claims. The verdict is borne out by several studies, much better controlled experimentally, where patients have been divided into various groups, submitted respectively to treatments of various kinds or no treatment at all. The results of these studies bear out the findings that psychoanalysis has little apparent effect as compared with other treatments or no treatment at all; again, therefore, psychoanalytic treatment receives no support from the outcome of the experiments.

One might have thought that psychoanalysis might be more positive in its effects on children, as they might be considered to be more impressionable and more easily cured. Here too, however, an extensive review of the literature shows findings almost identical in every detail with those for adults. There is no evidence that psychoanalysis of children produces any kind of effect on the neurotic symptoms of these children, over and above spontaneous remission.

No Facts, No Results

In 1952, I published a short paper listing the evidence and describing what I thought was the only possible conclusion to which it could lead, i.e. that psychoanalysts had failed to show that their methods produced any ameliorating effects on people suffering from neurotic disorders. This brief, factual, and innocuous paper produced a shower of replies, critiques, refutations, arguments, and discussions. It did not however, produce a single mention of a single experiment or clinical trial that had demonstrated a positive effect for psychoanalytic treatment. Indeed, in recent years the more official and better-informed psychoanalysts have become more wary of making any claims of therapeutic effectiveness for psychoanalysis. Glover, to take but one example, has explicitly rejected such claims in his latest book. The Chairman of the Fact Finding Committee of the American Psychoanalytic Association has stated that his Association had no positive evidence on the point and did not make any kind of claim of therapeutic usefulness. Schmiedeberg and many other analysts came to similar conclusions in print. It was left to the large herd of faithful believers, who had no direct knowledge of psychoanalytic practices and were ignorant of the existence of a large experimental literature, to continue to make claims which are not in any way supported by the evidence.

Some evidence has appeared to suggest that, while psychotherapy is no more effective than spontaneous remission, this may be due to the effects of averaging over many therapists. The suggestion was that some therapists did in fact help their patients with the obvious corollary that others actually harm theirs! There is some evidence to support this view, though I don't think for a moment that it is conclusive. What the evidence suggested was that it was the personality of the psychotherapist which was important. Those who were concerned, open, emotionally supportive, friendly, and helpful with advice seemed to obtain better results than those who were cast more in the traditional moId of the orthodox psychoanalyst—remote, unresponsive, forbidding, interpreting dreams rather than offering advice, cold, and concerned more with the purity of the theory than with the suffering of the patient. If all this was true, then it drives another nail into the Freudian coffin, since the indication was that what counted was the personality of the therapist, not the theory or the method on which he relies. That is quite contrary to Freudian teaching; while not entirely oblivious to the individual differences in ability among his pupils, Freud thought that the method itself was all-important.

Pigeons Are Dumber Than We Thought

So why, the reader may ask, is psychotherapy so widely praised by people who have undergone it, and claim to have been cured by it? The answer I think lies in a famous experiment, reported by the American psychologist B. F. Skinner. He left a group of pigeons alone in their cage for 12 hours but arranged for an automatic hopper to throw out a few grains of corn at intervals to the hungry animals. When Skinner returned in the morning, he found that the animals were behaving in a very odd manner. Some were jumping up and down on one leg, some were pirouetting about with one wing in the air; others again were stretching the neck as high as it would go. What had happened? The creatures, in the course of their explorations, had accidentally made that particular movement when the hopper had released some corn. The pigeons, no slouches at the post hoc ergo propter hoc argument, imagined that the movement preceding the corn had in fact produced the corn. So they immediately began to repeat the same movement again and again. When finally another reward came tumbling out of the hopper, the pigeons became more firmly convinced of the causal consequences, so throughout the hours they performed the movement and the hopper at regular intervals dispensed the corn.

To leave out the anthropomorphic terminology, and to put it in slightly more respectable language, we may say that the pigeons became conditioned to make a particular response in order to receive a particular reward. There was nothing mysterious about the experiment, which Skinner entitled "A Study in the Growth of Superstition," and we have directly related it to the growth of the belief in the efficacy of psychoanalytic treatment, both among patients and among psychoanalysts themselves.

Neurotics get better regardless of treatment; this improvement constitutes the reinforcement, and is equivalent to the corn received by the pigeon. The actions of the psychotherapist are as irrelevant as is the behavior of the pigeon in the experimental situation. Neither is instrumental in producing the reinforcement, but both become connected with it through processes of conditioning; thus a superstition is created, both in the pigeon and in the patient, linking the one with the other. Much the same is true of the therapist himself; for him too the reinforcement is the improvement reported by the patient. This is independent of his actions, but because it follows them in time the conditioned response is established. There is nothing in the published evidence to contradict this hypothesis, and much to support it.

It has often been said that psychoanalysis is more than a curative technique, and that a failure to prove the efficacy of psychotherapy would not necessarily invalidate the truth of the psychoanalytic doctrine in other respects. (Conversely, it might be said that even if psychoanalysis were found to be a successful method of therapy, this would not necessarily prove the truth of the psychoanalytic doctrine). There may be a truth in this, but I think it should be accepted only with grave reservations. In the first place, the whole doctrine of psychoanalysis was based on information obtained during the treatment of neurotic patients, in the course of trying to effect an amelioration of their symptoms. To admit that the primary purpose of psychoanalysis had results in complete failure, but that, nevertheless the doctrine was correct and scientifically valuable, seems, on the face of it, inconsistent ("By their fruits shall ye know them"). And this is not all. If the theory is correct, then the method of treatment would seem to develop from the theory and, what is more, it should work in practice. Conversely, if the theory of psychoanalysis is correct, then spontaneous remission and the various non-analytic methods of treatment should not be effective and should leave the individual, if anything, worse off rather than better. Thus we have a specific deduction from the hypothesis which the facts disprove thoroughly; I shall come back to this point a little later on.

It remains a theoretical possibility that parts, at least, of psychoanalysis might conceivably be correct, though its therapeutic methods are shown to be useless, but we would require very strong evidence indeed before accepting such a conclusion. Much experimental work had been done in attempts to verify or disprove parts of the psychoanalytic structure, and on the whole it has been very detrimental to psychoanalytic claims. In saying this I must make one important distinction. Most laymen completely misunderstand the Freudian doctrine, and therefore mistake as confirmatory evidence facts which are in reality quite neutral. Freud used certain well-known facts in a rather peculiar manner; the facts themselves may be true, but their verification does not imply that his use of these facts was correct. As an example of this, let me take the concept of symbolism.

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The Meaning of Dreams

We frequently use symbols in our discourse, in our writings, and possibly also in our dreams. These facts have been known for thousands of years; the reader may like to recall the biblical dream of the Seven Lean Kine and the Seven Fat Kine. Modern apologists of the psychoanalytic movement sometimes write as if Freud had discovered symbolism—as well as sex and many other important matters. His actual contribution, however, has been altogether different. He has suggested a possible mechanism and reason for the use of symbols, and ways of deciphering the symbolic language of the dream. I do not know of any evidence to indicate that these contributions have a factual basis, and I know many reasons why they should be considered highly unlikely.

In the first place, one and the same dream is often interpreted along entirely different lines by different analysts; frequently these accounts are contradictory. It would seem, therefore, that if one account is "correct," all the others must be false. We are not, however, given any means of deciding which is the "correct" account, nor is the possibility ruled out that all of these accounts are in fact erroneous and have no reference to reality. Analysts often suggest that the proof of the correctness of the interpretation can be found either in the patient's acceptance of the interpretation, or else in the patient's recovery after the interpretation has been made. Arguments of this kind are too illogical to deserve an extended reply; a patient's "acceptance" of an analyst's interpretation can hardly be regarded as scientific evidence. And as we have shown previously, the patients are likely to get better anyway, dream interpretation or no dream interpretation, so improvement is also irrelevant to the truth or falsity of the theory.

A Young Woman Gets Mounted

In isolated and highly selected cases, a good argument can sometimes be made out in favor of the Freudian notions. Consider the following example. A young girl dreams that a young man is trying to mount a rather frisky horse. He almost succeeds on two occasions and finally achieves success on the third. The analyst elucidates that:

1. The young man in the dream is the patient's fiance.

2. The patient's nickname is "Cheval."

His interpretation is that she wishes to have intercourse with her fiance, and she volunteers the information that on two occasions she and her fiance went so far in their love-making that she only just succeeded in extricating herself. So far, so good; here we seem to have an excellent example of Freudian symbolism at work, together with his notion of "wish fulfillment."

But remember that according to Freud's theory, the reason for the use of symbols was simply that the matter was too painful or too intolerable for the mind of the dreamer to be accepted without disguise. Is it really believable that a young girl who went as far as this in her lovemaking found the notion of intercourse so painful to contemplate that it had to be disguised in symbolic form? Far from supporting the Freudian position, this example seems to demonstrate that though symbols do occur in dreams, the Freudian explanation of their occurrence does not fit the facts at all. Thus data which superficially may seem to support the Freudian view, can often be found on closer inspection to contradict it significantly. It is the admixture of true and long-known facts which makes credible to the unwary reader Freud's peculiar and unwarranted use of these facts. prompting a famous psychologist to say of psychoanalysis: "What is new in it is not true. and what is true in it is not new."

Little Hans is Afraid of Horses

Freud showed a distinct failure to comprehend a distinction between a fact and the interpretation of that fact, but this failure was rendered less obvious than it would otherwise be by his excellent command of language. For a supreme example of this, it is worth going back to Freud's original writings and rereading his Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy—the famous case of little Hans. This has achieved historical importance and has been universally praised by psychoanalysts as the inauguration of all child analyses. Little Hans developed a fear of horses after having seen a horse that was pulling a bus along the street fall down in front of his eyes. Freud only had one short interview with little Hans; all the rest of the material was provided by the child's father, who, we are told, was an ardent follower of Freud.

The father, as will be seen by anyone reading through the account, is constantly telling little Hans what he wants him to say, and he usually continues until little Hans (who after all was only five years old) gives some kind of consent. When even this pressure produced no results, the father had no hesitation in saying that Hans really meant exactly the opposite of what he actually said, then treating this as an established fact. Freud seems to have realized this to some extent and says: "It is true that during the analysis Hans had to be told many things which he could not say himself, that he had to be presented with thoughts which he had so far shown no signs of possessing and that his attention had to be turned in the direction from which his father was expecting something to come. This detracts from the evidential value of the analysis, but the procedure is the same in every case. For a psychoanalysis is not an impartial scientific investigation but a therapeutic measure." Freud himself followed exactly the same procedure as the father, because in his interview with the boy he told him "that he was afraid of his father because he himself nourished jealous and hostile wishes against him." The boy, his introspections, his sayings and thoughts, are never really in the picture; what we always get is what either his father or Freud told him he should think or feel on the basis of their particular hypothesis. And whether the child could finally be made to agree or not the result was always interpreted as being a vindication of the theory.

No one who has a scientist's almost instinctive veneration for facts can regard this psychoanalytic classic as anything but a straightforward attempt to fit a child's testimony into the Procrustean bed of a previously determined theory. It is difficult to imagine anything little Hans could have said or done that could not in this manner have been transfused into support of the theory. Even so, there remain glaring inconsistencies in the account. Thus, little Hans was afraid' of the "black things on the horses' mouths and the things in front of their eyes"; Freud claimed that this fear was based on mustaches and eyeglasses and had been "directly transposed from his father onto the horses." In fact the child was thinking of the muzzle and the blinkers which had been worn by the horse that fell. Again Freud interpreted the agoraphobic element of Hans's neurosis (his fear of going out) "as a means of allowing him to stay at home with his beloved mother." Nevertheless, both the horse phobia and the general agoraphobia were present even when little Hans went out with his mother!

11 Month Old Albert Plays With Rats

Can modern psychology do better than that? Can we account for little Hans and his fear of horses and open spaces, along somewhat more scientific lines? The answer must surely be yes. Many years ago the American psychologist, J.B. Watson, made an experiment in which he used the mechanism of conditioning to produce a phobic fear of rats in an 11-month-old boy, little Albert, who was very fond of playing with these animals. Watson used Pavlov's well-known method of pairing the to-be-conditioned stimulus with another stimulus which always produced the desired effect; in Pavlov's case, pairing a bell with the presentation of food to the dog. After a number of such pairings, the dog salivated to the bell alone, which he had never done previously.

Watson stood behind little Albert, and beat a metal bar with hammer whenever Albert stretched forward to play with the rats. The noise frightened Albert, and after a number of such pairings this fright conditioned to the rats. He thus developed a phobia for rats which generalized to other furry objects like rabbits, Father Christmas masks, and furry coats; Exactly the same seems to have happened to little Hans; the fright experienced when the horse fell became conditioned to horses in general, and to the surroundings where he might come across horses. There seems to be no call for mysterious Oedipus complexes, infantile sexual desires for his mother, and jealous hatred of his father. Of course, all these psychoanalytic mechanisms make a much better story; Pavlovian conditioning sounds flat compared with these exuberant fantasies. Unfortunately, the simple account seems correct ; an illustration of what T. H. Huxley called the great tragedy of science—a beautiful theory slain by an ugly fact!

We must return now to the paradox presented at the beginning of this article: if scientifically trained students of the subject reject Freud's theories and methods, why are they still so popular among laymen, writers, dramatists, poets, painters, and other artists? The answer is essentially simple. Freud was a great novelist and dramatist himself; his theories are like a medieval morality play, with heroes, villains, and monsters rushing about in all directions. Here the "ego," "id," and "super ego" have their three-cornered fight; there the censor battles with the forces of the "unconscious." Watch the celebrated "Oedipus complex" burrowing its way to the surface! See "sublimation" and "displacement" at work! Watch Eros battling against Thanatos! There is a tremendous cast and their antics are astounding. The whole action of the play is centered on sex—what could be a greater draw than that? All this has nothing to do with science—and Freud himself once confessed that "by nature I am no scientist"—but it has a tremendous appeal to literary and artistic people. After all, Freud speaks their language!

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And how useful are Freud's theories and concepts for the struggling artist trying to give a fresh twist to an old-fashioned theme! Freudian notions lend themselves beautifully to this sort of thing, and writers and artists have consequently embraced psychoanalysis with enthusiasm, making constant use of his marvelous imagery. And the man in the street? Amused and incredulous at first he soon noticed that the art world took up these ideas; this made them respectable enough to discuss them in the drawing room, or at the cocktail party.

Now a great advantage of Freudian ideas is that you don't have to have read much in order to get a smattering of them. Soon everybody who is anybody can take part in this game, and psychoanalyze their friends and acquaintances. Where there is no proof, you cannot be wrong. However silly your contribution may be, and however out of the way—so much the better. It's a free-for-all. and tremendous fun at that. So psychoanalysis became popular, and our paradox was born. Scientists might frown, and philosophers point to. lack of proof. or even to impossibility of proof, but as the man in the street does not read scientific journals, or philosophical ones either, all this did not worry him.

Also, there was no competition. Pavlovian conditioning may be a much better theory to account for neurotic behavior, and may even have given rise to new and much more efficacious methods of treatment, like behavior therapy. But this does not impress the man in the street who tends to look on science as rather dreary at the best of times, full of incomprehensible mathematics—and Pavlovian conditioning fits exactly into this mould. There are thousands of laboratory experiments concerned with conditioning and learning and you cannot really take part in a discussion unless you have read them all. So the man in the street avoids Pavlov and embraces Freud. Talk about conditioning is boring, where talk about Freud and sex is exciting.

The Girl With The Erect Penis

One may often wonder if those who are so impressed with Freudian theories really understand what they are endorsing. Let me quote an example, contributed by Martin Grotjahn, a well-known American psychiatrist and follower of Freud. Most of us would imagine that we have a pretty good idea of the reason why we take an interest in a voluptuous and lively young drum majorette as she marches in front of the band at a football game, breasts a-jiggle and thighs exposed to admiring glances. One might imagine that ordinary conscious impulses and reactions, familiar to the average man, are adequate to account for our interest. But this is not good enough for the Freudian. Grotjahn advises us to note that if the group of men who make up the band is compared with the human body, then the smaller figure of the prancing girl in front of the band can be compared to the erect penis, standing out in front of the body. We are also reminded that the baton flourished so conspicuously by the girl is, according to Freud, a typical phallic symbol. Through these steps of "reasoning" we are led, not to the suggestion but to the positive statement that the real source of men's interest in relies on their unconscious homosexuality, their unadmitted impulses to perform deviant acts with other men. It would be surprising if many readers of this magazine knew this, or would accept the notion so presented. Freud would account for their refusal by postulating the concept of "resistance," and argue that precisely because they did not accept the interpretation, the refusal is proof of the correctness of the interpretation! This is not an isolated example, but a typical one which could be duplicated a thousand times over; this is the sort of argument that believers in the Freudian hagiology accept.

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Are All Men Secretly Gay?

Such notions have even been employed quite widely in market research and advertising. "Motivation researchers" contend that the advertising picture of a pretty girl eating a banana does not appeal to us because we like pretty girls, and may even like to eat fruit—nothing so simple! Symbolically, the picture stands for fellatio; our enjoyment derives from liking oral sex. Similarly, we don't really want to smoke cigarettes—we want to be "sucked off." It does not worry the motivation researcher that far more men than women smoke; here, again, he can appeal to the omnipresent unconscious homosexuality we have already encountered. Obviously, you cannot prove this sort of thing, and you cannot disprove it; it is quite outside science. Nevertheless, much of the advertising you see on television is based on such ideas.

From the simple commercial point of view, however, it is often difficult to see the virtues of "motivation research." Suppose you show a banana scene on the theory that it will remind viewers of fellatio, what are you hoping to achieve? It is mostly women who buy things like fruit and vegetables, and women (readers, prepare yourselves for a shock) aren't all that keen on fellatio. A recent study showed that well over half didn't like it at all. So by reminding them of it you are more likely to put them off bananas than make them go out and buy them—hardly what was intended.

Or maybe the idea is that men, watching the advertisement, would be so maddened by the implicit joys hinted at that they would run to the nearest fruit store? I cannot regard this as very likely. It is not my intention to deny certain vague similarities between fellatio and banana eating; I just doubt if these would act in the way motivation experts hope.

Perhaps a confession is in order here. Banana adverts never suggested fellatio to me (until I was told about the intention by motivation researchers). However, I recall that when I saw my first "blue film," with the heroine munching away at her consort's more-or-less erect penis, the scene reminded me very strongly of banana eating! Perhaps advertisers should show blue films if they want people to become banana conscious. In short, I fear all this sad stuff put up by the advertising industry is just so much nonsense, even though it seems to be lapped up by the not-too-bright manufacturers who have caught the Freudian bug. And of course it's fun to talk about such things—much more fun than actually going out and discovering by scientific research whether this type of advert is more or less successful than other types in selling bananas!

What, then, is my own estimate of Freud in the future? By his insistence on determinism, by his belief in the possibility of psychological treatment, by drawing attention to the similarities between normal and abnormal, by his constant emphasis on anxiety as a causal factor in neurosis, and by his daring acknowledgement of the importance of sex, he certainly made a tremendous contribution to psychiatry. He was not the first to stress any of these things, and others have as good a claim to be remembered, if not a better one. But his influence was great, and in all these fields it was for the good.

When it comes to psychoanalysis itself, his specific theories are almost certainly destined for the rubbish-heap, and so are his methods of treatment. Psychoanalysis is being replaced by other, quicker and better, methods of treatment, like behavior therapy and the many new drug treatments. The notion of the unconscious, so dear to Freud's heart, is hardly accepted now, even by his followers. Insofar as it was original (dozens of writers over the centuries had explicitly advocated ideas of this kind before Freud) it has proved useless. The house that Freud built has been pretty well razed to the ground; some of the bricks may be found useful by other, newer architects, but the new buildings will look nothing like Freud's.

There is one point on which I feel more certain than almost any other. Freud, in spite of all his positive contributions, set psychiatry back over 50 years by his failure to realize the importance of scientific proof. Where he led, others have followed; take up any textbook of psychiatry and you will find plenty of speculation, but very little fact. Freud never bothered about experimental proof for his theories; when an American psychologist suggested to him the possibility of providing such proof, he answered: "I don't need experimental proof; I find enough proof on the couch." But all that he found "on the couch" were the demented babblings of his patients; these do not constitute proof for anyone not brainwashed into blind obedience to the oracle.

Alas, Freud's example was followed by thousands of other psychiatrists; their theories might differ, but their methods were speculation without proof. This sort of habit is difficult to get out of, and even nowadays psychiatry is still far removed from being a proper medical science. Psychiatrists themselves tend to agree with this assessment; this is what the 1951 Conference on Psychiatric Education had to say: "It was clearly apparent at the Conference that there is a considerable respect among medical educators for the part played by selected, competent, and broad-minded psychiatrists in the education of good physicians. It was not nearly so evident. and indeed it may be doubted, whether there is a comparably high regard for psychiatry as a body of scientific principles and working hypotheses."

Instead of following other sciences in carefully amassing facts, constructing small-scale theories in close contact with these facts, and setting out to find new facts to confirm or invalidate these theories, psychiatry has followed the Freudian precept of constructing huge, wide-ranging theories of global impact, on the basis of practically no facts at all, and with contempt for those who ask for proof. This is not the way of science, and the present low regard for psychiatry in medical and scientific circles is in no small measure the direct consequence of the "Freudian revolution." Only by abandoning Freud will psychiatry be able to achieve proper recognition as a medical and scientific discipline.