Abstract
I respond to John Scott Werry's tendentious review [1] of the above book, which I found an exasperating muddle. The book itself is incidental to Professor Werry's review, which he uses as an opportunity to launch a polemic against Freud and psychoanalysis. It is to this polemic that I respond.
Professor Werry conflates the culture around psychoanalysis with the merit or otherwise of its theories. I will deal with these issues separately.
With regard to theory, Professor Werry does not specify just what it is he finds so objectionable in Freud. He is, of course, entitled to his opinion that the kind of meanings interpreted by Freud are ‘false’ types of meaning, but without actually analysing any particular instance, he leaves us with much assertion and no argument. Professor Werry emphasizes that he took ‘great comfort’ in finding that upon opening a volume of Freud a second time, 40 years after his first encounter, he was able to confirm that it was still ‘rubbish’, but by urging his reader to accept this assertion without any kind of logical argument he invites the kind of ‘unseemly credulity’ of which he is so scathing.
Professor Werry does not distinguish between Freudian theory and psychoanalytic theory(s) in general. Unfortunately, this is an all too common misrepresentation of the contemporary situation. Within the psychoanalytic community most of Freud's original theoretical formulations have undergone modification with time, and many of them have been more or less abandoned. To question elements of Freudian theory need not prove fatal to psychoanalytic thinking as a whole.
Professor Werry also seems quite unaware of the inherent nature of psychoanalytic activity. To suggest, as he does, that ‘greedy, narcissistic adult psychiatry… monopolizes a disproportionate share of the available resources’, and would ‘disdain to consider the extremes of life’, is, at least in my view, an attempt to establish a psychoanalytic perspective upon the collective behaviour of psychiatrists. I cannot judge the truth of the assertion, but it is a form of psychoanalytic interpretation, albeit crude.
Second, turning to the question of the culture surrounding psychoanalysis, I think there is truth in Professor Werry's judgment that elements of the psychoanalytic establishment have at times displayed similarities to a religious cult, particularly in North America. For a long time following World War II, the psychoanalytic culture in North America would seem to have been dominated by a conservative establishment that was threatened by divergence from orthodox Freudian theory. One interesting manifestation of this was the establishment's attempts to restrict psychoanalytic training to medical graduates, contrary to Freud's own recommendation. There were indeed elements of a fundamentalist church.
That fundamentalism should creep into and contaminate any movement in human affairs would be, one might hope, no surprise to a psychiatrist. That fact is evidence about human nature, but not argument against psychoanalysis. Perhaps psychoanalysis could even offer us some important perspectives on the phenomenon of fundamentalism. Professor Werry does not seem to consider that fundamentalism might be found among biological psychiatrists! Fundamentalism is easily recognized by demonization of alternative creeds and the exhortation to cast out the devil; in the case of Professor Werry's review, the devil would appear to be psychoanalysis. Professor Werry is clearly familiar with the language of fundamentalism: [P]sychoanalysis is a ‘nostrum’; the ‘Dark ages of psychoanalysis’; ‘apparently smart and welleducated medical academics' who are ‘mesmerized’ by psychoanalysis; the ‘research’ of biological psychiatrists as against the ‘religion’ of psychoanalysts.
In concluding that Freud was ‘mad’ Professor Werry is perhaps correct, but then, is not madness an inescapable part of our individual and collective human endowment? Freud's genius lay in adopting a scientific attitude and making madness, whether his patients' or his own, a matter for observation, inquiry and analysis. For all his limitations, Freud remains one of the towering intellectual figures of the twentieth century precisely because of his passionate interest in the ‘human spirit’, which as Professor Werry points out, will not be suppressed. Nor will Freud and psychoanalysis. This year is the 150th anniversary of his birth, an event being marked and celebrated in various ways around the world: ‘down and dying’? I don't think so.