NATHAN G. HALE, JR.
Freud's Critics: A Critical Look
As
an his torian, I have been reading the burgeoning Ii terature of the Freud
wars, a field of vituperative contention, with fascination and dismay-the
passions and follies of both sides. On the one hand, there is the pained
indignation of such Freudian loyalists as Kurt Eissler; on the other the ele–
gant diatribes of the literary critic Frederick Crews, who hopes to purge
America of the scourge of psychoanalysis. Revisionists fear the black hand
of the Freud "establishment" presumably attempting to suppress their
legitimate scholarship. The Freudians fear the distorted onslaughts of a
motley crew of unqualified critics. Where in all this is a sense of perspec–
tive and judicious judgment of what remains a towering historical figure
and a serious profession? In fact, how good is the research of Freud's crit–
ics and how sound are their judgments?
The current devaluation of Freud obviously was inspired by the offi–
cial idealizations that began wi th Ernest Jones, who saw him as the carrier
of a new dispensation. But that is not the whole story.Jones had a streak
of what might be termed ambivalence or objectivity, depending on one's
preference. Some of Freud's intimates who read his book in manuscript did
not perceive Jones as a sycophant. Indeed, he was seen as subversively crit–
ical and we owe to him the first full glimpses of Freud's own neurotic
difficulties, his superstitions about death, and his skeptical fascination with
the occult and with thought transference, as well as his troubled relation–
ship with Wilhelm Fliess, a Berlin physician and early confidant. In this
respect,Jones was the first of Freud's biographical critics, although for him
Freud remained a hero and a major figure in Western scientific thought.
This was not a universal opinion, and controversy is part of the history of
psychoanalysis.
Freud's psychoanalysis has been under attack almost from its inception.
Many of our current critics are merely repeating strictures raised almost a
hundred years ago, particularly regarding sugges tion. At the same time some
of the grounds of opposition have shifted like a kaleidoscope. Before World
War I, American conservatives saw psychoanalysis as morally subversive.
American communists in the 1920s denounced it as a sick conventional
bourgeois ideology. Through the 1950s, prominent American Catholics
judged it to be godless and amoral. In this vein, the literary critic John
Farrell now insists that Freud's paranoid disposition reinforced a modern
culture of suspicion that besmirches all tradition and nobility with dirty
explanations. But the English critic Richard Webster argues that Freud
