Bullshit Fields (4)

My fourth bullshit field, as you might expect, is psychoanalysis. An easy target. Nobody, not even defenders of the field, really thinks that the human mind is divided into id, ego, and superego. Historians, philosophers, and biographers have pretty much demolished the Freudian edifice, piece by piece, showing how Freud basically made up the entire thing out of bogus case studies. Does anyone really think, any longer, that neuroses are caused by the repression of childhood sexual traumas? As therapy, psychoanalysis is endlessly repetitive. The kind of cures that Freud claimed to have effected don't really happen in real life, I suspect. They probably didn't happen for Freud either.

One characteristic of a bullshit field is that is cannot protect itself against confirmation bias, in other words, the tendency to find what you want to find. Freudianism is rife with such bias, since a Freudian will find Freudian motifs wherever he looks, and any objection to this is termed "resistance." If you don't agree with a Freudian, that just confirms the validity of the insight! The system is immune from falsification, as Popper argued. Freud was particularly prone to confirmation bias because he thought he was immune from it. He even, famously, claimed to have analyzed himself! He was very smart, but extremely arrogant in this regard. (Confirmation bias, briefly, is favoring information that confirms a pre-existent view of things. Suppose we wanted to prove that television violence fosters violent behavior. Suppose then we videotape kids after they've watched tv and watch the videos. We would want to make sure that the people watching and scoring the videos did not know which children were in the control group and which had just watched violent images. Why because the bias of the research itself is to find causation. [That's another bullshit field, by the way.] If you think about it, Freud's method was the opposite, designed expressly to magnify this kind of bias rather than control for it. Suppose you wanted to design an experimental method in which the researcher's views are always confirmed? If I wanted to design something like that I would come up with something like psychoanalysis. An authority figure doctor in a room with the patient for an hour trying to confirm his theory through conversation.)

At one time, Freud's ideas had a huge impact on elite and popular culture. Now, not so much. I think only film studies still uses psychoanalysis, which is understandable given the historical origins of this field. Remember when every Hitchcock film hinged on a psychoanalytic conceit?

(Obviously, psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy "work" for some people. And I'll concede that Freud was a great "genius" too, since apparently that's what you have to say. I'm not in favor of replacing talk therapy with mere pills, or debating the relative merits of different therapies in detail. The intellectual edifice standing behind the practice of analysis is just not there any more, in any significant sense. See Crews, ed. Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend, 1999, as well as his ealier The Memory Wars. If you read these books and still think highly of the edifice, there's probably nothing I could say to convince you. If you haven't been exposed to this historical evidence, then you really don't know enough to make up your mind. I, too, grew up assuming Freud was as solid as anything. The problem is that there is no evidence for it outside of the self-confirming clinical practice.)