Freud goes up in smoke

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Freud goes up in smoke

Granddaughter dismisses theories as outdated

Psychoanalysis done in by new drug therapies

 

 

JUDY GERSTEL

 

Would the last Freudian please turn out the lights?

 

The dimming of Freud's influence and fading of what he preached and practised —

from penis envy to psychoanalysis — are making him little more than a footnote

of history despite his brand name.

 

" The idea that the unconscious mind makes people ill is no longer credible, "

says Edward Shorter, author of A History Of Psychiatry and history of medicine

professor at the University of Toronto, on sabbatical leave this year.

 

" It's hard to imagine a scientific article in psychiatry that would treat him

even as footnote. "

 

In the film Neighbours: Freud And Hitler In Vienna, which opens the Rendezvous

With Madness Film Festival tonight, Freud's granddaughter Sophie reminisces

about her famous relative. " In my eyes, both Adolf Hitler and my grandfather

were false prophets of the 20th century. "

 

Retired as a professor of psychology at Simmons College in Boston, Sophie Freud

will be at tonight's screening and will participate in a discussion afterwards.

 

She dismisses most of her grandfather's theories as " outdated " and says that

another psychiatrist, Irving Goffman, " had a much better grasp on human

motivation than Freud. "

 

She also faults her grandfather for " being very angry about any critique and

viewing people who criticized him, or thought otherwise, as villains. "

 

Freud and Hitler didn't just share a neighbourhood in Vienna, she says in the

film. " They also shared the ambition to convince other men of the one and only

truth that they had come upon. "

 

Speaking by phone from Boston, Sophie Freud attacks Sigmund's certainty.

 

" Never could he be wrong, " she says. " That lasted for 50 years after his death,

until a few people started to dare to say, " Yes, but ... "

 

Before long, " but " became outright scepticism.

 

" Penis envy, the bad mother — nobody believes that stuff anymore, " says Shorter.

 

" Completely absurd, " agrees historian of psychology Sonu Shamdasani of the

Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine in London, England, and author

of Jung And The Making Of Modern Psychology: The Dream Of A Science.

 

Freudian beliefs and psychoanalysis, he says, " were never a science. Freud was a

fashion, and then he became unfashionable. "

 

In little more than a century, Sigmund Freud went from upstart to irrelevant.

 

But in between, during the golden age of psychoanalysis from 1920 to 1970, he

was regarded as a messiah and an intellectual icon.

 

" Everyone was into it, " recalls Dr. Joel Paris, chief of the department of

psychiatry at McGill University, about Freud's theories and psychoanalysis.

" This is what we talked about and believed. "

 

Unlike most analytical psychiatrists training in the 1960s, Paris didn't go to a

psychoanalytic institute. " And I was considered a rebel for not doing it, " he

says.

 

He adds, " I think it was a case of the Emperor's new clothes. "

 

Paris is completing a book on " how it happened that 40 years ago, psychoanalysts

were leaders of psychiatry and today they have become marginal. "

 

One reason, he says, is because at the time psychiatry didn't really have

anything else to offer.

 

Plus, " the public relations was really excellent because they said you had to be

analyzed too, so we all got analyzed. Once you've been analyzed and the longer

you've spent on couch, isn't it harder to say, `Maybe this wasn't the best

idea'? "

 

Psychology historian Shamdasani says Freud was " a good marketer. "

 

" Freudian legend erroneously gave Freud credit for formulating a revolutionary

theory, which it is nothing of the sort, " he says.

 

But even today Freud is not without some diehard disciples, a dwindling coterie

who still practise Freudian analysis.

 

" A few of these aging dinosaurs clung to the true faith, " says Shorter, " but

psychoanalysis has really vanished from psychiatry. "

 

The granddaughter of the father of psychoanalysis explains, " The bad thing was

that psychoanalysis kept itself apart from the scientific advances of time,

stuck in a 19th-century way of thinking. "

 

Freud's status started to take a tumble in the 1960s when authority and

established ideas were overturned, in particular those that he represented:

institutionalized medicine, psychiatric treatment, patriarchy.

 

" It started with his view of women, " Sophie Freud says, explaining her

disillusionment with her grandfather's thinking.

 

" If you didn't have a vaginal orgasm, you were not a mature woman, and the

clitoris didn't count. Stuff like that, penis envy, it was amazing. Women

believed the great man more than their own bodily experiences. "

 

But she doesn't hold Freud responsible for the subjugation of women.

 

" His ideas grew out of society. He mirrored in his theories the belief that

women were secondary and were not the norm and didn't quite measure up to the

norm. "

 

But what really did in Freud was not feminism but drugs, according to Shorter.

 

Beginning with Miltown in the 1950s, the efficacy of pharmaceuticals in fixing

mental ailments from schizophrenia to depression made Freud's theories outmoded,

even risible.

 

" The mechanism could not possibly be the unconscious mind, " says Shorter. " These

drugs address the brain. "

 

Other factors, too, contributed to the collapse of Freudianism: historical

research revealing the falseness of the Freudian legend, the rise of

evidence-based medicine, the motivation of psychiatry to get back into the

medical mainstream, the theories of developmental psychology that contradicted

Freud's theories about childhood, and competing psychotherapeutic approaches

including cognitive behaviour therapy which was shown to be more effective than

psychoanalysis.

 

Finally, a flap in the mid-1980s about " recovery " during therapy of repressed

memories of childhood sexual abuse and satanic rituals served as a nail in the

coffin.

 

" If penis envy made us look dumb, this will make us look totally gullible, " said

psychiatrist Paul McHugh at the time, while chairman of the psychiatry

department at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

 

The latest thrust in the demise of Freud is brain research. " The big shots in

psychiatry now are people who do imaging and genetics, " says McGill's Paris.

 

With biology and brain chemistry accountable for psychiatric disorders and

technology replacing hypothesizing, Freud's theories have gone the way of

leeches and laudanum.

 

Could it be that Freud is the Ptolemy of medicine, Ptolemy being the astronomer

circa 150 A.D. who believed the earth was the centre of the universe?

 

Sophie Freud believes her grandfather deserves some respect for his ideas, if

not adherents. " There's no need to tear down the interesting things he thought

about, " she says.

 

Paris says there's a legacy that does need to be retained.

 

" Psychoanalysis taught us to listen to our patients, to empathize, to spend time

with them, " he says.

 

Also, he says, " Everybody agrees that there is an unconscious. But the idea that

it's structured in the way Freud described or that you can get access to it

through dreams or free association is not generally accepted any longer. "

 

New York psychiatrist Kenneth Porter, of the Center for Spirituality and

Psychotherapy, is even more respectful.

 

" Right now society is in a stage of adolescence with regard to Freud, " he says.

" It's how our teenage kids relate to us: `You're crazy, you don't know nothing,

you're outdated.'

 

" When they're little, they think of us as god, which was how we thought of Freud

for the first 40 years. I think society is going to come to a more mature

relationship with Freud. So much that he taught us is so healing. "

 

Sure, he made mistakes, says Porter, " but he figured the whole thing out himself

and never even had an analyst to help him! "

 

 

 

jgerstel

 

 

 

 

 

 

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