Book Review
Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture
N Engl J Med 1993; 328:1131-1132April 15, 1993
- Article
Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture
By E. Fuller Torrey. 362 pp. New York, HarperCollins, 1992. $25. ISBN: 0-06-016812-9The psychiatrist who ventures beyond the consulting room or hospital ward takes on a considerable challenge. Our training does not automatically equip us to make well-reasoned judgments in other disciplines. The careful writer knows this, yet with adequate familiarization and scholarly safeguards, he or she can often enrich a dialogue by the use of the special perspective that experience in our field provides. If this is done poorly, however, without consideration of the hazards, the results can fall below acceptable standards.
Dr. Torrey, who has written in the past on the care of the chronically mentally ill, aims in this study to explore the influence of Freudian theory on American culture and intellectual thought. He describes the work of members of the “intellectual elite,” among them Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Benjamin Spock, Erik Erikson, and Karl Menninger, and endeavors to show that their adoption of Freudian thinking was self-serving and fallacious. This, he feels, has resulted in errors in their scholarship and has aided misguided liberal causes such as sexual freedom, excessive permissiveness in child rearing, progressive education, social activism, and the personal growth movement.
Torrey believes that the chief error these thinkers commit is to use Freudian theories about childhood sexuality and the influence of early childhood experience on later development in support of the nurture side of the nature-nurture debate. This enables them to shift responsibility for their own neurotic difficulties onto parents, environment, and society, as well as to find erroneous justifications for their personal and political agendas. For example, in the case of the cultural anthropologist Benedict, some of whose writings address the role of culture in causing homosexuality, Torrey states that she “felt herself to be a cultural misfit throughout her life, and she held her culture to blame.” Later on, the author describes Dr. Spock as sexually inhibited and the victim of an overly dominant mother; he believes that Spock found rationalizations for his problems in his personal psychoanalysis. This then led Spock to organize his thinking about child rearing along Freudian psychoanalytic lines, to the detriment of both children and parents. He writes, “Spock thus [laid] the groundwork for the widespread contemporary exploitation of child counseling and psychotherapy.”
The main reason that Torrey believes these thinkers' work to be misguided, apart from their personal neurotic distortions, is that he finds Freudian theory itself unscientific and prejudiced by problems in Freud's character. He proposes, for example, that Freud's wish for fame, interest in the occult, and personal use of cocaine in the 1890s offer prima facie evidence to dispute the scientific validity of the theory he was developing at that time. Torrey points to a number of studies (the most recent being from 1970) that examine whether childhood experience influences later personality development and finds no evidence to support the belief that it does. More recent writing on the challenges posed by empirical testing of psychoanalytic concepts is not presented.
A profound and outspoken anti-therapy stance lies at the heart of Torrey's thesis. He protests that “Freudian theory is usually presented sympathetically by college professors because many have themselves been in psychotherapy.” At one point, he equates long-term psychotherapy with the “eructation of childhood trivia.” In addition, he feels that the ultimate effects of so many years of Freudian thinking on American culture, apart from the misallocation of health resources to counseling and away from major mental illness, arise from derivative problems such as excessive narcissism, the denigration of women (because of Freud's supposed phallocentric and misogynistic bias), and the diminution of the sense of responsibility.
As one can readily observe, this is a deeply felt but strident and provocatively written book. Although the author is energetic in presenting his thesis, his indignation gets ahead of his scholarship. The nature-nurture question, central to his thesis, is oversimplified and excessively polarized. In addition, there are out-of-context quotations, an excessive reliance on secondary sources, and a spuriously selective reading of the historical record. Opportunities to enrich the discussion are passed up. For example, when the author acknowledges near the end that Freud did, after all, believe in constitutional predisposition (that is, nature plus nurture), he declines to explore this challenge to his argument and to address the true intricacy of the as yet incomplete story of psychological development. Such problems impair the author's ability to contribute cogently to the study of Freud's influence on American intellectual life or to explore the basis of the society's receptivity to his thinking -- questions that are ultimately at the heart of such an inquiry.
As I noted at the start, there are caveats for any psychiatrist who ventures into fields such as history, biography, and social criticism. It is difficult terrain to cross. More fundamentally, however, it is Torrey's misreading of Freud himself -- the misapprehension of the meaning of the abandonment of the seduction theory, the oversimplification of Freud's views on nature and nurture, the misinterpretation of Freud's views about responsibility and the relation between the individual and society -- that is a further barrier to the scholarly acceptance of this work. Ironically, it is not only Torrey's lack of mastery of the nonpsychiatric landscape, for which some indulgence on the part of the reader might be expected, but his failure to comprehend the intellectual roots of his own discipline that is so disappointing.
Gary Goldsmith, M.D.
1419 Beacon St., Brookline, MA 02146- Citing Articles (1)
Citing Articles
1
Zvi Lothane. (2001) Freud's Alleged Repudiation of the Seduction Theory Revisited: Facts and Fallacies. The Psychoanalytic Review 88:5, 673-723
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