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many people. The fact that children have intense, vivid fantasies at very
early ages, which take the form of experiences which could have been
traumatic had they occurred,
that
is a discovery of psychoanalysis.
It
is not
more or less important than real trauma, but it is certainly far more preva–
lent than real childhood trauma. Childhood fantasies are ubiquitous,
universal. Severe childhood trauma, particularly sexual trauma, is a tragic
but relatively uncommon event. So psychoanalysis's discovery of a univer–
sal psychological phenomenon is qui te different, and in some ways on the
other side of the debate than Crews's attack would suggest.
Why is Crews so angry? I can't answer that. I don't know him very
well: I met
him
the night of the debate and have not seen
him
since. He
marshalls a series of arguments, but I question how much weight we
should give them. One of the arguments is that there are things about
Freud's personal life that make him less than ideal. True, without getting
into details, Freud wasn't ideal. Secondly, that Freud's scientific method was
significantly flawed. Also true. Crews is unfair in that he uses contempo–
rary standards for evaluating the methodology of clinical research of one
hundred years ago and he's unfair in that he discounts Freud's method of
discovery because it was not accompanied by an adequate method of vali–
dation. On balance, Freud was not a great behavioral scientist in terms of
methodological purity or sophistication. My response to that would be,
who cares? If the scientific database of contemporary psychoanalysis were
Freud's work of one hundred years ago and there had been no repetition,
confirmation, or other data to support it, it would be of no interest what–
soever today. If today there's a body of knowledge to support it, who cares
whether the first hypothesis was based on rigorously collected, carefully
analyzed, valid data? Mendel's data were seriously flawed. No contempo–
rary geneticist would worry about that. If we discovered that Newton's
data or Copernicus's data were seriously flawed we'd find that a historical
amusement, not a credible attack on physics or astronomy. I believe Crews
is employing faulty logic in equating the scientific basis of psychoanalysis
in 1997 with the methodological purity of Freud's work in 1897.
He also complains that psychoanalysis is inherently based on sugges–
tion, which contaminates its data base in a way that makes it impossible to
analyze its claims scientifically. He explicitly borrows this complaint from
Adolph Griinbaum. What it says, in effect, is that when a therapist talks to
a patient, regardless of the purity or contamination of the therapist's
motives, the therapist can either intentionally or inadvertently, by the way
he or she asks questions or seems interested or directs attention, plant ideas
rather than discover them, suggest answers rather than get the patients
answers and convince both the patient and the therapist that what seems to
grow out of therapeutic inquiry in fact pre-existed in the mind of the ther-
