Freud and the crippling of psychoanalysis
$18.65
Paperback
We know that Freud insisted on sex as the key to neurosis. This led him to some grotesque results such as telling a psychotic patient to divorce his wife, leave his children and re-marry because sexual satisfaction would cure him.
Guess what. It didn't. The first wife died in poverty and the second realtionship foundered, the man, broke down.
All right. It was a new "science" and Freud was not only the founder but the defender--surely a difficult position. Eventually, you would think, theory would develpop, become less rigid. The opposite happened. Freud mercilessly attacked anyone who deviated in the slightest, calling them psychotic--he even referred to Stekel as a pig!--until just as in a cult, he had created a closed society of the faithful. It included a committee to guard the party line and root out deviants. This was a real pity not only for the patients and disciples but because it set back the development of psychoanalysis itself.
About Brenda
Brenda Webster was born in New York City, educated at Swarthmore College, Columbia University, and University of California, Berkeley, where she earned her Ph.D. She is a freelance writer, critic, and translater who splits her time between Berkeley and Rome,...
Connections
Causes Brenda Webster Supports
Doctors Without Borders
The Nature Conservancy
Women Support Women
International PEN
Poetry Flash
I suspect that much of
sixties and seventies angst is down to Freud's theories. His influence is gradually waning and is now being exposed for its personal bias, as far as I understand it. But the effects of his legacy will run and run.
To calculate complex human beings in terms of their sexuality alone would seem to be putting the cart before the horse. Sex is an expression of whatever's going on in the deeper wellsprings of the psyche and is generated by other forces and traumas.
Can it ever be more than symptomatic?
Freud on sexuality
Brenda Webster has it just right. Sexuality is certainly important, but Freud, in his relentless drive for fame, tried to make it the motive for everything. It was even worse with his loyal followers such as Ernest Jones and Kurt Eissler who had none of the brilliance and insights that are there in Freud's writings, along with the grand -- and misguided -- theories.
Lou Breger