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Although his psychoanalytic empire is in disarray, weakened by assaults from without and divided by bitter internecine rivalry into a thousand squabbling fiefdoms, Sigmund Freud still casts a long shadow. True, "the Viennese quack," as Vladimir Nabokov dubbed him, is no longer enshrined in the pantheon of science, but who can deny that Freud has been Very Influential?
To take the measure of that influence, the Library of Congress planned an exhibit, scheduled to open in 1996, called "Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture." Late in 1995, however, after a number of scholars signed a petition calling for the proposed exhibit to "adequately reflect the full spectrum of informed opinion about the status of Freud's contributions," the show was postponed. The library cited budgetary reasons, but most observers attributed the action to the controversy raised by critics of the advisory board, which was heavily stacked with Freud partisans such as biographer and historian Peter Gay.
Predictably, the New York Times weighed in with the judgment that the "never-ending backlash against Freud confirms the potency of his theories." (Heads, I win; tails, you lose.) Peter Gay agreed. "Freud's message is really hard to take," he said, implying that the critics needed psychotherapy.
After a long delay, the exhibit, curated by Michael Roth, finally opened in October 1998. In that same month, Michael Cromartie interviewed scholar Paul Vitz about Freud and his legacy. Vitz is professor of psychology at New York University. He is the author of more than 100 articles and four books, including Sigmund Freud's Christian Unconscious (1988). Vitz and Cromartie spoke via telephone.
What is the state of the debate concerning Freud today? Why is he still such a controversial figure?
There are two kinds of controversy. First, there is controversy over Freud the man and what kind of person he was. There is a lot of evidence that, as he himself said, he was an "intellectual conquistador." He was an intellectual ideologue and conqueror. He was in no way a scientist. He was not even a fair clinician in the sense that he was always misrepresenting what he had found. He was frequently rather deceptive. And in addition, he seems to have had some unsavory personal characteristics that have lately been made public.
But the major critiques of Freud are not personal. They aim at the intellectual structure of the system. Freud himself, and many other Freudians when these ideas of his were first proposed, claimed that psychoanalysis had achieved the status of a science. These proponents held that Freud's themes were an application of the natural scientific tradition to the realm of the mind. Those pretensions are gone now. Today virtually no one believes that Freud's understanding of the mind has had any impact whatsoever on traditional science.
Some of the critics have said that psychoanalysis is really an "interpretive" science rather than an empirical science.
Yes, it is what I would call an applied philosophy of life. In fact, that is what all psychotherapies are. So therefore, psychoanalysis is no more an empirical or naturalistic science than Stoicism, if you will. The Oedipus Complex, for example, is as far from being proven today as it was at the time of Freud.
In fact, even most psychoanalysts have given up trying to claim that they are practicing science. That is a big shift. Nowadays many important Freudians talk about psychoanalysis as a kind of storytelling, or mutual narrative interaction. They are getting deeply into hermeneutics and narrative theories. Once you understand psychoanalysis as the construction of a story about the person's life, then you have a very different understanding of Freud. It can be helpful, but it leaves the issue of whether it is true or not somewhere behind, and it certainly leaves behind the issue of whether it is scientific.
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