Re: Re: Freud and Science

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Rod Hay wrote:

>  There is some differences
> of opinion about the effectiveness of psychoanalysis versus other forms of
> cognitive therapy. Psychoanalysis produces the same results but it usually takes
> longer than other methods.
>

Actually, all conclusions about the treatment of depression are
suspect, since it is so difficult to measure with precision when a
person is depressed, when she/he isn't. The illness turns itself
off and on, as it were, in bewildering fashion, so the fact that
I am (or am not) depressed today or next week is no necessary
evidence that a given treatment worked/didn't work.

But the description of depression as "aggression turned inwards"
is merely a label, and even if a correct label doesn't really tell us
anything about either depression or its treatment. Quite aside
from the question of "empirical evidence," the problem with
most psychoanalytic statements is that they are subject to
Marx's criticism (in *Poverty of Philosophy*) of Providence.
They are merely a sort of summary or paraphrase of the
facts masquerading as an explanation.

Talk therapy (of any old kind, as long as the therapist doesn't
launch an attack on the patient, which does happen) serves the
purpose of keeping the depressed person in touch with the
outside world. So Rod is correct in seeing that there is no real
difference between any two kinds of talk therapy. Psychonalysis,
then, is merely one variety of talk therapy, and neither its
successes nor failures tell us anything whatever about the
validity or falsity of psychoanalysis itself.

Freud was a good poet/critic: he wrote good poems and then
wrote interesting critical interpretations of his own poems. *The
Interpretation of Dreams* and the *Psychopathology of
Everyday Life* in particular should not be compared to serious
psychological analysis but to *Charterhouse of Parma*, *Pere
Goriot*, *Mansfield Park*, *Bleak House*, *Middlemarch*,
*Wings of the Dove* *Molloy*, *Ulysses*, *Brothers Karamozov,
et cetera -- all the great bourgeois novels and their valiant
attempts to make the abstract individual imaginable.

Carrol