Psychoanalysis: Criticisms

Exchanges between critics and defenders of have often been so heated that they have come to be characterized as the .

Popper argues that is a pseudoscience because its claims are not testable and cannot be refuted, that is, they are not falsifiable.[29] For example, if a client’s reaction was not consistent with the then an alternate explanation would be given (e.g. , reaction formation).

Kraus was the subject of two books written by noted libertarian author Thomas Szasz. Karl Kraus and the Soul Doctors and Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus’s Criticism of and Psychiatry portrayed Kraus as a harsh critic of and of in general. Other commentators, such as Edward Timms (Karl Kraus - Apocalyptic Satirist) have argued that Kraus respected Freud, though with reservations about the application of some of his theories, and that his views were far less black-and-white than Szasz suggests.

Grünbaum argues that psychoanalytic based theories are falsifiable, but that the causal claims of are unsupported by the available . Other have produced alternative methods for psychotherapy, including behavior therapy, cognitive therapy, Gestalt therapy and person-centered psychotherapy.

Hans Eysenck determined that improvement was no greater than spontaneous remission. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of “neurotics” would recover naturally; this was no different from therapy clients. Prioleau, Murdock, Brody reviewed several therapy-outcome studies and determined that psychotherapy is no different than placebo controls.

Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze claimed that the institution of has become a center of power, with its confessional techniques resembling the .[30] Strong criticism of certain forms of is offered by psychoanalytical theorists. Jacques Lacan criticized the emphasis of some American and British psychoanalytical traditions on what he has viewed as the suggestion of imaginary “causes” for symptoms, and recommended the return to Freud.[31]

Bracha Ettinger criticised “empathy without compassion”, the imaginary “ready-made mother-monster” offered by some analytical traditions as “cause” for psychic suffering, and the blindness to methods that cause splits and block the psychic path to “primary compassion”. She also has noted the damage to the feminine brought by the ignorance of the unconscious transformational sphere created by prebirth-prematernal transconnectivity.[32]

Together with Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari criticised the Oedipal structure.[33]

Luce Irigaray criticised the “phallogocentrism” of the Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytical theories.[34]

Due to the wide variety of psychoanalytic theories, varying schools of often internally criticize each other. One consequence is that some critics offer criticism of specific ideas present only in one or more theories, rather than in all of while not rejecting other premises of . Defenders of argue that many critics (such as feminist critics of Freud) have attempted to offer criticisms of that were in fact only criticisms of specific ideas present only in one or more theories, rather than in all of . As the psychoanalytic researcher Drew Westen puts it, “Critics have typically focused on a version of psychoanalytic theory—circa 1920 at best—that few contemporary analysts find compelling… In so doing, however, they have set the terms of the public debate and have led many analysts, I believe mistakenly, down an indefensible path of trying to defend a 75 to 100-year-old version of a theory and therapy that has changed substantially since Freud laid its foundations at the turn of the century.” link to Westen article.

A further consideration with respect to cost is that in circumstances when lower cost treatment is provided to the patient as the analyst is funded by the government , then psychoanalytic treatment occurs at the expense other forms of more effective treatment[35]

Challenges to scientific validity

An early and important criticism of was that its theories were based on little quantitative and experimental research, and instead relied almost exclusively on the clinical case study method. In comparison, brief psychotherapy approaches such as behavior therapy and cognitive therapy have shown much more concern for empirical validation (Morley et al. 1999). Some even accused Freud of fabrication, most famously in the case, and miraculous cure of Anna O. (Borch-Jacobsen 1996).

An increasing amount of empirical research from academic psychologists and psychiatrists has begun to address this criticism.

A survey of scientific research showed that while personality traits corresponding to Freud’s oral, anal, Oedipal, and genital phases can be observed, they cannot be observed as stages in the development of children, nor can it be confirmed that such traits in adults result from childhood experiences (Fisher & Greenberg, 1977, p. 399). However, these stages should not be viewed as crucial to modern . What is crucial to modern psychoanalytic theory and practice is the power of the unconscious and the transference phenomenon.

Some claim the idea of “unconscious” is contested because human behavior can be observed while human psychology has to be guessed at. However, the unconscious is now a hot topic of study in the fields of experimental and social psychology (e.g., implicit attitude measures, fMRI, and PET scans, and other indirect tests). One would be hard pressed to find scientists who still think of the mind as a “black box”. Presently, the field of psychology has embraced the study of things outside one’s awareness. Even strict behaviorists acknowledge that a vast amount of classical conditioning is unconscious and that this has profound effects on our emotional life. The idea of unconscious, and the transference phenomenon, have been widely researched and, it is claimed, validated in the fields of cognitive psychology and social psychology (Westen & Gabbard 2002), though such claims are also contested. Recent developments in neuroscience have resulted in one side arguing that it has provided a biological basis for unconscious emotional processing in line with psychoanalytic theory i.e., neuropsychoanalysis (Westen & Gabbard 2002), while the other side argues that such findings make psychoanalytic theory obsolete and irrelevant.

E. Fuller Torrey, considered by some to be a leading American psychiatrist, writing in Witchdoctors and Psychiatrists (1986) stated that psychoanalytic theories have no more scientific basis than the theories of traditional native healers, “witchdoctors” or modern “cult” alternatives such as est (p. 76). In fact some scientists regard as a pseudoscience (Cioffi, 1998).

Among philosophers, Karl Popper argued that Freud’s theory of the unconscious was not falsifiable and therefore not scientific.[29] Popper did not object to the idea that some mental processes could be unconscious but to investigations of the mind that were not falsifiable. In other words, if it were possible to connect every conceivable experimental outcome with Freud’s theory of the unconscious mind, then no experiment could refute the theory.

Anthropologist Roy Wagner in his classic work The Invention of Culture ridicules and tries to account for personality and emotional disorder in terms of invention and convention.[36]

Some proponents of suggest that its concepts and theories are more akin to those found in the humanities than those proper to the physical and biological/medical sciences, though Freud himself tried to base his clinical formulations on a hypothetical neurophysiology of energy transformations. For example, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur argued that can be considered a type of textual interpretation or hermeneutics. Like cultural critics and literary scholars, Ricoeur contended, psychoanalysts spend their time interpreting the nuances of language — the language of their patients. Ricoeur claimed that emphasizes the polyvocal or many-voiced qualities of language, focusing on utterances that mean more than one thing. Ricoeur classified as a hermeneutics of suspicion. By this he meant that searches for deception in language, and thereby destabilizes our usual reliance on clear, obvious meanings.

Theoretical criticism

Psychoanalysts have often complained about the significant lack of theoretical agreement among analysts of different schools. Many authors have attempted to integrate the various theories, with limited success. However, with the publication of the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual much of this lack of cohesion has been resolved.

Jacques Derrida incorporated certain aspects of psychoanalytic theory into his practice of deconstruction in order to question what he called the ‘metaphysics of presence’ or ’self-presence’. This was the defining trait (for Derrida) of traditional metaphysics, namely its assumption that the meaning of utterances can be pinned down and made fully evident to consciousness, perhaps most evident in Descartes’ conception of ‘clear and distinct ideas’. Derrida is here influenced by Freud (among others such as Marx and Nietzsche). For instance, Freud’s insistence, in the first chapter of The Ego and the Id, that philosophers will recoil from his theory of the unconscious is clearly a forbear to Derrida’s understanding of metaphysical ’self-presence’. However, Derrida goes on to turn certain of these practices against Freud himself, in order (in Derrida’s typical manner) to reveal tensions and contradictions in Freud’s work which are nonetheless the very conditions upon which it can operate - its simultaneous conditions of possibility and impossibility. For instance, although Freud will define religion and metaphysics as a displacement of the identification with the father in the resolution of the Oedipal complex (e.g. in The Ego and The Id and Totem and Taboo) Derrida will insist (for instance in The Postcard) that the prominence of the father in Freud’s own analysis is at the same time indebted to and an example of the prominence given to the father in Western metaphysics and theology since Plato. Thus (in a similar manner to that in which Levi-Strauss reads Freud’s understanding of the Oedipal complex as but another version of the Oedipus myth[citation needed]), Derrida understands Freud as remaining partly within that theologico-metaphysical tradition[citation needed] (’phallologocentrism’ Derrida helpfully calls it) which Freud nonetheless criticizes.[citation needed] However, the purpose of Derrida’s analysis is not to refute Freud per se (which would only be to reaffirm traditional metaphysics), but rather to reveal an aporia (an undecidability) at the very heart of Freud’s project. Such a ‘deconstruction’ (or indeed ) of Freud does tend to cast doubt upon the possibility of delimiting as a rigorous science. However, in doing so it celebrates and pledges a critical allegiance to that side of Freud which emphasises the open-ended and improvisatory nature of , and its (methodical and ethical) demand (for instance in the opening chapters of the Interpretation of Dreams) that the testimony of the analysand should be given prominence in the practice of analysis.

, or at least the dominant version of it, has been denounced as patriarchal or phallocentric by proponents of feminist theory.[citation needed] Other feminist scholars have argued that Freud opened up society to female sexuality.

Related posts

May 18, 2008 | Filed Under Uncategorized 

Comments

Leave a Reply