THREE OF A KIND:

A plea for empiricism: a review of FOLLIES OF THE WISE: Dissenting essays by Frederick Crews (Jerry A. Coyne, Times of London)

Some years ago, I decided to become a more well-rounded scientist and, on the advice of friends in the humanities, started to read Freud. Expecting deep insights, I began with the work of which Freud himself was proudest, The Interpretation of Dreams. But I found it puzzling. His analyses of nocturnal productions, such as his own dream of “Irma’s Injection”, are clever. But as a scientist, I couldn’t understand why Freud saw his interpretation (that he wished to be the primordial “father” possessing all of the women embodied by Irma) as correct, when there are numerous plausible alternatives. Nor was I convinced by his flat assertion that every dream represents the disguised fulfilment of a wish. The whole enterprise reminded me of the excesses of evolutionary psychology, where adaptive stories about human behaviour pass for scientific truth.

My discomfort with Freud’s lack of rigour only grew as I continued to read his books and case histories. The latter were especially problematic: surely there were better explanations of Little Hans’s fear of horses than their symbolic representation of his father, haunting Hans with the threat of retaliation for his Oedipal fantasies. (It has since more plausibly been suggested that Hans was simply traumatized after seeing a horse collapse in the street.) Was Freud making it all up as he went along? Or did I have a personality flaw that blinded me to the power of his contributions? After all, he is touted (along with Darwin and Marx) as one of the three greatest modern thinkers, and only a hermit could be unaware of how deeply his ideas permeate Western society.

Fortunately, Frederick Crews has made a much more thorough study of Freud, distilling and interpreting not only his whole corpus but also the past three decades of Freud scholarship. His conclusion is that Freud was indeed making it up as he went along. In Follies of the Wise, Crews takes on not only Freud and psychoanalysis, but also other fields of intellectual inquiry which have caused rational people to succumb to irrational ideas: recovered-memory therapy, alien abduction, theosophy, Rorschach inkblot analysis, intelligent design creationism, and even poststructuralist literary theory. All of these, asserts Crews, violate “the ethic of respecting that which is known, acknowledging what is still unknown, and acting as if one cared about the difference”.

Mr. Coyne's flaw is, rather, his faith that Darwin differs from Freud and Marx.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 16, 2006 10:52 AM