Negative 1nc

1ar – theory wrong

No predictive value – the fact it can’t be consistently replicated robs it of explanatory potential

Sadovnikov 7 – professor of philosophy at York University (Slava, “Escape from Reason: Labels as Arguments and Theories”, Dialogue, September 2007, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0012217300002249 //DBI
The way McLaughlin shows the rosy prospects of psychoanalytical social theory boils down to this: there are people who labour at it. He reports on Neil Smelser’s lifelong elaborations of psychoanalytical sociology, which prescribed the use of Freudian theories. Then he presents a “powerful” psychoanalytical theory of creativity of Michael Farrell, commenting on how the theorist “usefully utilizes psychoanalytic insights,” though McLaughlin does not specify them. He correctly expects that I might not view his examples as scientific. Their problems begin well before that. First, due to their informative emptiness, or tautological character, all they amount to is rewordings of everyday assumptions. Second, due to their vagueness these accounts are compatible with any outcomes; in other words, they lack explanatory and predictive power. The proposed ideas are too inarticulate to subject to intersubjective criticism, and to call them empirical or scientific theories would be, no matter how comforting, a gross misuse of words.

On the constructive side, a psychoanalytic theorist may be challenged to unambiguously formulate her suppositions and specify conditions of their disproof, to leave out what we already well know and smooth out internal inconsistencies, and revise the theories in view of easily available counter-examples and competing accounts. Only after having done this can one present candidate theories to public criticism and thus make them part of science, and fruitfully discuss their further refinements. Another suggestion is not to label them “powerful theories,” “classics,” or anything else before their real scrutiny begins.

That criticism and disagreement are indispensable for science is not a “Popperian orthodoxy,” although Popper does champion this idea; it is the pivot of the tradition (which we owe to the Greeks) which identifies rationalism with criticism. 4 McLaughlin ostensibly bows to the critical tradition but does not put it to use. Instead of critical evaluation of the theories in question he writes of “compelling case,” “powerful analytic model,” and “useful conceptual tool.”

On the methodological side of the issue, we should inquire into the mode of thinking common to Fromm and all adherents of confirmationism. The trick consists in mere replacement of familiar words with new, more peculiar ones; customary expressions are substituted by “instrumental intimacy,” “collaborative circles,” and “idealization of a self-object.” Since the new, funnier, and pseudo-theoretical tag does the job of naming just as well, it “shows how” things work. The new labels in the cases criticized here do not add anything to our knowledge; nor do they explain. We have seen Fromm routinely abuse this technique. The vacuity of Fromm’s explanations by character type was the central point in my analysis of Escape, yet McLaughlin conveniently ignores it and, like Fromm, uses the method of labelling as somehow supporting his cause.

The widely popular practice of mistaking new labels for explanations has been exposed by many methodologists in the history of philosophy, but probably the most famous example of such critique comes from Molière. In the now often-quoted passage, his character delivers a vacuous explanation of opium’s property to induce sleep by renaming the property with an offhand Latinism, “virtus dormitiva.” The satire acutely points not only at the impostor doctor’s hiding his lack of knowledge behind foreign words, but also at the emptiness of his alleged explanation. (Pseudo-theoretical literature is boring precisely because of its “dormitive virtue,” its shuffling of labels without rewarding inquiring minds.)

Let me review notable criticisms of this approach in the twentieth century by Hempel, Homans, and Weber leaving aside their forerunners. This problem was discussed in the famous debate between William Dray and Carl Hempel. Dray argues, contra the nomological account of explanation, that historians and social scientists often try to answer the question, “What is this phenomenon?” by giving an “explanation-by-concept” (Dray 1959, p. 403). A series of events may be better understood if we call it “a social revolution”; or the appropriate tag may be found in the expressions “reform,” “collaboration,” “class struggle,” “progress,” etc.; or, to take Fromm’s suggestions, we may call familiar motives and actions “sadomasochistic,” and any political choice save the Marxist “escape from freedom.”

Hempel agrees with Dray that such concepts may be explanatory, but they are so only if the chosen labels or classificatory tags refer to some uniformities, or are based on nomic analogies. In other words, our new label has explanatory force if it states or implies some established regularity (Hempel 1970, pp. 453-57). For example, you travel to a foreign country and, strolling along the street, see a boisterous crowd. Your guide may explain the crowd with one of several terms: that it is the local soccer team’s fans celebrating its victory, or it is a local religious festival, or a teachers’ strike, etc. The labels applied here—celebration, festival, strike— have explanatory value, because we know that things they refer to usually manifest themselves in noisy or unruly mass gatherings.

If, on the other hand, by way of explaining the boisterous crowd the guide had invoked some hidden social or psychological forces, or used expressions such as embodiment, mode of production, de-centring, simulacra, otherness, etc., its causes would remain obscure. If she had referred to psychoanalytic “character types” (say, Fromm’s authoritarian, anal, or necrophiliac types), the explanation would not make much sense either. Nothing prevents us nevertheless from unconditionally attaching all these labels to any event. The mistake McLaughlin and confirmationists persistently make is in thinking that labelling social phenomena alone does theoretical and explanatory work.5 George Homans observed the prevalence of this trick some decades ago:

Much modern sociological theory seems to us to possess every virtue except that of explaining anything. . . . The theorist shoves various aspects of behavior into his pigeonholes, cries “Ah-ha!” and leaves it at that. Like magicians in all times and places, the theorist thinks he controls phenomena if he is able to give them names, particularly names of his own invention. (1974, pp. 10-11)

Psychoanalysis is not inductive or empirical – it’s more religious than scientific.

Holowchak 12 – professor philosophy Rider University (M. Andrew, “When Freud (Almost) Met Chaplin: The Science behind Freud's Especially Simple, Transparent Case", Perspectives on Science, MIT Press Journals, Spring 2012, Vol. 20, No. 1, Pages 44-74, Project Muse)//RZ

Elsewhere, I have addressed (Holowchak, forthcoming) the difficulties of certainty in analytic therapy, both from the perspective of individual constructions a therapist makes to assure him that each construction is correct and that his overall etiological assessment is correct. I noted that Freud made special use of a jigsaw-puzzle analogy and disclosed three needed conditions for assuring correctness of any construction and correctness of etiological assessment: the intelligibility, fittingness, and correspondence conditions. A construction must be intelligible (i.e., meaningful), all of the elements of a construction must ªt together tightly like puzzle pieces, and the construction must match the (screen) memory of the patient. The puzzle analogy, I argued, seems prima facie plausible, but on close analysis it is casuistical, because jigsaw puzzles are unlike constructions in key respects. The conclusion at which I arrived—a conclusion I believe Freud himself embraced in mature writings on clinical theory and one which does not show psychoanalytic therapy to be nothing but bosh—is that there can be no such thing as certainty in analytic therapy. Yet here I wish to say more. The fittingness condition, I suspect, cannot be met with any degree of reliability. If all three conditions are jointly sufficient for the correctness of any construction or end-of-the-day analytic assessment, as I believe they are, then certainty is out of the question. Overall, too much turns on coherence and the problem of patients being led by suggestion in a manner that matches the theoretical orientation of a therapist—for Freud, that being Oedipus-rooted—is magnified. In short, Freud’s clinical therapy seems more top-down than bottom-up. Theory drives its data. Still, Freud consistently maintained in publications and letters that system-building in the manner of a philosophical or religious Weltanschauung was not his aim. For instance, in a letter to Putnam (8 July 1915), Freud intimates that he qua scientist is uninterested in any sort of methodological synthesis of psychoanalytic material. “For the time being, psycho-analysis is compatible with various Weltanschauungen,” he begins humbly and concessively. “But has it yet spoken its last word? For my part I have never been concerned with any comprehensive synthesis, but invariably with certainty alone. And it is worth sacrificing everything to the latter” (Freud et al. 1961).24 One can only wonder whether Freud is being deceitful or deceptive. Overall, Freud’s forays into group-psychology issues, early human history, and metapsychological speculation betray a preoccupation with system-building. In integrating biology into psychoanalysis through metapsychological analysis, Freud was system-building—i.e., essaying to give psychoanalysis extraordinary explanatory power and scope in the manner of Newtonian dynamics. There is one element of system-building, characteristic of philosophical systems more than religions, that is an integral part of science— consistency—a needed ingredient of a scientific theory and scientific explanation. Unlike philosophical systems, presumably built top-down, Freudian psychoanalysis is said to be data-driven and bottom-up. Following his commitment to Positivism and his inference of the sexual etiology of hysteria from 18 observed cases in “Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896, S.E., III: 198, 220), Freudian psychotherapy is seemingly based on eliminative induction of the Baconian/Millian sort, which strives both to seek confirmatory evidence for a hypothesis and rule out others through disclosure of disconfirmatory evidence—i.e., evidence inconsistent with competing hypotheses. John Greenwood challenges Freud’s presumed eliminative inductivism. He suggests that “[Freud] treated consistency with the empirical data as providing sufficient confirmation of psychoanalytic theory and ignored those alternative causal hypotheses that the canons of eliminative induction mandate.” Greenwood, adding spice to Popper’s condemnation, says that Freud behaved like a “Popperian ‘naïve’ inductivist,” in that he seldom took seriously and often ignored alternative explanations. Thus, the question for Greenwood is not whether Freudian psychoanalysis, narrowly construed as a method for treating patients, works—he thinks it is unquestionably effective if only because of the placebo effect—but whether Freudian psychoanalysis as a method for treating patients works because of Freudian theory (1996, pp. 607–8). Greenwood leaves good reason to be doubtful. Greenwood’s concern is Freud’s clinical work, but if psychoanalysis has a broader application, as I have argued it does, then Greenwood’s suspicions are more fully confirmed. For instance, of his notion of the killing of the primal father and general account of human prehistory, called a “Just So Story” by an unkind critic, Freud writes, “[B]ut I think it is creditable to such a hypothesis if it proves able to bring coherence and understanding into more and more new regions” (1921, S.E., XVIII: 122). Execrating the sort of explanations given by Weltanschauungen, Freud must be talking about the scientific status of the killing-of-the-primal-father hypothesis, yet he clearly is not using eliminative induction here. Moreover, saying something is “creditable” is not to offer sufficient confirmation of its truth. Freud is appealing to coherence here and nothing more. Freud is system-building. Seeing psychoanalysis rooted in clinical data, Freud must be arguing for veridicality by appealing to coherence through consistency with those data. Yet we have already seen that the data are likely to be highly unreliable, so coherence with them amounts to foofaraw. With what are we left? The Freudian psychoanalytic theoretical system seems to be standing alone and it is, according to Freud’s account of Weltanschauungen, as much of a house of cards as he says is any philosophical or religious system, which can do nothing empirically to rule out or, at least, make implausible other possible explanations—an important part of eliminative inductivism.

It ignores larger social forces

LaBier 10, PhD in psychology, psychoanalytic therapist, and Director of the Center for Progressive Development in Washington, D.C., (Douglas, 10/28/10, Why Psychotherapists Fail To Help People Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-new-resilience/201010/why-psychotherapists-fail-help-people-today)//kap
Many people who enter psychotherapy today aren't helped at all. Some end up more troubled than when they began treatment. And ironically, some therapists are examples of the kinds of problems they're trying to treat. In this post I explain why that is and how to become a more informed consumer when considering psychotherapy. The popularity of the TV show "In Treatment (link is external)" is one indicator that there's a large, market for psychotherapy, today. Despite the decline of the more orthodox psychoanalytic treatment - the kind that Daphne Merkin described in a recent New York Times article (link is external)about her years in treatment - people continue to seek competent professional help for dealing with and resolving the enormous emotional challenges and conflicts that impact so many lives in current times. Beyond healing, they want to grow their capacity for healthy relationships and successful lives. Many skilled and competent therapists are out there. (I use term "therapist" to describe psychologists, psychiatrists and clinical social workers - professionally trained and licensed practitioners.) Moreover, research shows that psychotherapy can be very effective. Either alone, or sometimes in combination with the judicious use of medication. Yet so often practitioners don't help people very much. Some struggle for years in therapy with one practitioner after another, and never seem to make any progress. Others resolve some conflicts, but then are hit with others that hadn't been addressed. I see three reasons for this situation. One is rooted in the kind of people therapists tend to be today. Their personal values, social attitudes and how they relate to conventional norms and behavior contrast in several ways with those of the "pioneers" from Freud's era. That contrast impedes effective help. Then there are the kinds of problems that people experience. They've evolved over the decades, but especially since 9-11 and the near-depression that began in the fall of 2008. But many therapists aren't in synch with the impact of that shift. They fail to understand how 21st Century conditions impact emotional lives and conflicts. Many are clueless about how life in today's world interweaves with the dysfunctions or family conflicts that patients bring with them into their adult lives. The third reason is the therapists' vision of the goals of treatment; what a healthy outcome or resolution of conflicts should look like, and how to get there. Many remain stuck within an older model - helping patients better manage, cope with or adjust to change and traumas; build resilience and restore equilibrium. But that's no longer possible: Our new environment is one of "non-equilibrium" and unpredictability. That creates new emotional and life challenges across the board -- for intimate relationships, careers and for engaging with a changing society - the "remix" that America is now becoming. The Psychotherapist - Past and Present The early analysts were pioneers, adventurous explores of uncharted terrain. They were trying to uncover how human personality and unconscious passions evolve within people to create symptoms and dysfunctions. They courageously risked their careers when they called attention to the impact of repressed sexuality. Aside from the accuracy of early theories about the causes of emotional disturbance, the practitioners' aim was to reduce suffering. They wanted to help people develop more love, reason and independence - albeit within the context of the norms of their era that they, themselves, accepted. Moreover, most were well-read in literature, history and culture, more so than today's practitioners. That gave them a broad outlook and perspective on life. For example, Freud's writings are filled with references from Shakespeare, Goethe and other great works of literature, drama and mythology. He drew on their themes, plots and character portrayals to help illuminate and understand the motives and moral dilemmas underlying his patients' emotional problems. Most contemporaries and followers of Freud possessed a radical spirit. They wanted to uncover the truth beneath patient's symptoms; see beneath the surface. They shared the view that successful treatment was based on a love of the truth; that is, emotional reality. And that it must preclude any kind of sham, deception or illusion. Of course, Freud and his contemporaries interpreted their patients' problems in many ways that were flawed. They made assumptions about psychological health that were part of the prevailing values and norms of post-Victorian, early-20th Century society - a largely patriarchal culture. For example, most assumed that a normal, successful life derived from being well-adjusted to those norms. Nevertheless, their spirit of truth-seeking, rooted in broad understanding of human culture, literature and history, has become lost. Today's practitioners tend to be technicians, looking for the right technique that will treat the patient's symptoms. Many tend to be cautious, often disengaged and detached people in their manner and interactions with patients. They are largely ignorant of philosophical, religious, cultural and socio-economic forces that shape people's psychological development, especially those in non-Western societies. And yet, all of those forces in all parts of the globe profoundly impact how and why we learn to think and behave as we do. Much current world conflict reflects those differences that define what we think in "normal" or "disturbed." Many therapists today simply assume that adjusting to prevailing values and norms reflects psychological health. Now that's desirable for those whose conflicts have disabled them from minimally successful functioning. But it misses the mark for those whose conflicts are linked with their successful adaptation to begin with. The therapist then fails to explore their patients' definition of "success" - how it's shaped their career and life goals, their conflicts and disappointments. Some therapists will spend inordinate time ferreting out tiny truths about the patient's family and childhood, without figuring out which have relevance to the person's conflicts today, and which don't. They may ignore the impact of trade-offs and compromises patients made as they created their sexual and intimate relationship patterns Overall, today's practitioners tend to share in, rather than critique and examine, the social norms, values and anxieties of today's world. Too often, they uncritically accept good functioning per se, and conventional values like power-seeking, as psychologically healthy. This blinds them from recognizing that "normal" adjustment can mask repressed feelings of self-betrayal, self-criticism, and the desire to be freer, more alive. All of those longings can conflict with or oppose parental expectations or the pressures from social class membership. Emotional Conflicts In Today's World People's problems have evolved. Up through World War II and into the 1950s-early 60s symptoms that were more typical of Freud's time -- hysteria or specific phobias, for example - diminished. People wanted help for fitting in with the apparent paths to success and happiness and for dealing with conflicts that interfered with or limited it. Therapy often addressed things like guilt, inhibition, the need for approval, and dealing with the conflicts generated by defined, rigid roles for men and women. Desires or longings that deviated too much from the prevailing norms were troublesome and created conflicts, often unconscious. The popular TV show "Mad Men (link is external)" is a good portrayal of conflicts of that era, especially issues of identity, longing for an authentic self and gender roles. At the same time, the men enjoyed the surface appearance of power and control. And women chafed against the limits imposed by gender roles, as the women's movement began to arise. The period of social upheaval of the late 60s and 70s created more openly conscious conflict and struggle for many people. The theme, here, was seeking more freedom from oppressive relationships and social constraints. Some therapists were able to address these issues in helpful ways. But others were bound by their own uncritical embrace of the very norms their patients wanted help to free themselves from. Partly because of that disconnect, many psychotherapy patients were attracted to the vision of personal development offered by the rising "new age" movement, although its gurus generally lacked any depth of understanding about emotional conflicts or psychological development. Then, from the 1980s to about 2000 more men and women sought help to create more personally fulfilling, engaged relationships, and more personal meaning from their work. The costs and limits of success (link is external) became visible in patients who wanted help to create greater work-life "balance" while preserving their relationships and their upward climb in their careers. Dealing with the emotional fallout of the dot-com bubble burst added another dimension to these stresses. During this period of greater fulfillment-seeking, more people turned to spiritual development as a companion to or substitute for traditional therapy, especially via older traditions like Buddhism and other Eastern practices. And now, in the current era, emotional conflicts spring more from the psychological impact of our nonlinear, unpredictable, highly interconnected world. For example, financial and career uncertainties. Changing practices in romantic/sexual relationships. Facing one's responsibilities to fellow inhabitants of the planet, and for sustaining the planet for future generations. The psychological impact of these issues interacts with the legacy of family conflicts and their dysfunctions that people carry with them into the adult world. It's a new universe of potential pain and confusion that people are now struggling with.

Freud was a fraud and the study of psychoanalysis is a political joust for power among aspiring philosophers

Dufresne 15, social and cultural theorist best-known for his work on Sigmund Freud and the history of psychoanalysis, Professor of Philosophy at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario and the author of multiple books about Freud and psychoanalysis, (Todd, January 2015, 235. DR. TODD DUFRESNE ON FREUD’S LOOMING SHADOW OF DECEPTION, http://www.skeptiko.com/235-todd-dufresne-freud-deception/)//kap
Can you take us through the evolution of this Freud scholarship? What’s emerged in the last 20 or 30 years in terms of who Freud really was? What’s the story behind these murmurs we hear in the background that maybe Freud wasn’t all he was cracked up to be. Dr. Todd Dufresne: That’s a good question. I’ll back up just for one second and say this first to get into that: for myself, because I was interested in deconstruction, what happened to me is when I looked at Freud I realized that the work of deconstruction and psychoanalysis was not actually very good. So ironically I ended up being somebody that was interested in deconstruction but became a specialist in Freud. My first self-authored book, Tales From the Freudian Crypt, that you mentioned ends essentially before I started doing my own thing with a critique of Derrida on deconstruction. What I was left with was realizing the limitations of deconstruction and stuck with an area of study that I in fact never had any intention of being a specialist in, which is Freudian psychoanalysis. I’m very unusual, I suppose, because I came to psychoanalysis not because I was in analysis or I particularly liked it. Just purely because I was curious about it. To follow up on the rest of your question, the evolution of Freud scholarship, one of the things that really struck me pretty quickly was I got lucky in some ways. I was a TA for a guy named Paul Rosen, who’s a major Freud scholar and he was the main Freud scholar at York University. He’s one of the main biographers of Freud in the world. He has since passed away. I happened to be set up with him to be his TA, which made sense given my interests. What I quickly realized is that in the field of psychoanalysis there are certain texts and certain thinkers that are verboten. They’re not allowed, right? And certain kinds of thinkers that are not looked upon very well. Rosen was one of these people. My great luck is that I worked with a guy that was already kind of a heretic in psychoanalysis. I was immediately struck by how politicized the field was and how if you simply read somebody like Rosen’s work or many other scholars who have been on a list of heretics, you realize that there’s lots of great work out there that many people simply won’t read because it is somehow it’s been blacklisted one way or another. What I had to realize is that I had to find my own way. And that the field of criticism in the last 30-40 years was made possible by people like Paul Rosen, Henri Ellenberger, a great historian, as well. At the other end of that you’ll find Frank Coffey, a great philosopher who has since passed away as well and in the ‘90s somebody like Frederick Crews, who is an English professor from Berkeley, since retired. These people had to have a certain amount of courage to go against everyday convictions about Freud and psychoanalysis because, like I said, certain criticisms of Freud and certain viewpoints of Freud were just not indulged at all. So for me, I didn’t have to be brave in some ways. The field was already opened up by these people who suffered the consequences of their heresy, I suppose. Rosen, who started off as a darling of the psychoanalytic field and became a heretic, he really suffered personally at the hands of institutional psychoanalysis. He would have wanted to be accepted in some way, I think. For me, of course, I had no illusions. I never cared to be accepted by them and I also had no problem reading works that people wouldn’t read. Alex Tsakiris: Before we talk past that too much, give people a sense for this criticism. There are layers of criticism and the way you’re saying it I think people might get the impression that there’s a little tussle over how this should be interpreted or that should be interpreted when in fact the real historical touch-points that we have paint just a horrible picture of Freud—of someone who’s really a complete fraud. Who manufactures evidence in order to support his theories, that copies without attribution other people’s work or at least he promotes himself as being this original great genius when he’s really stood on the shoulders of all these other people. I mean, the history of it beyond just critiquing theory is just stunning for people who haven’t fully encountered it. The other side of that that I really want you to get into to support that is how we know this information was really held under lock and key and protected under the tightest controls for so long. Then it’s gradually pried loose. So give people a sense for that. Dr. Todd Dufresne: There’s so much to say I hardly know where to begin. In some ways, from my perspective, what really happened was Ernest Jones came out with this three-volume biography in 1953, 1955, 1957, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work. Then he died. Basically you have everything after the Jones biography, which is an official biography of psychoanalysis, as kind of a response to this official biography. What happens is that people start becoming more and more critical of psychoanalysis. For me, Rosen is one of the first figures in this regard and it’s around 1967 when he publishes a book called, Brother Animal, in which he reveals that one of Freud’s earlier followers committed suicide. I guess the radical side of this is that Freud was very unmoved by this follower’s plight. He was a sycophant like half the people surrounding Freud, and Freud rebuffed him in various ways and the guy committed suicide. Okay, that’s horrible but not entirely surprising in some ways. But deeper and more radical than that, Rosen exposed that during two periods in the 1920s Freud analyzed his own daughter, Anna, and that’s what really got him into trouble. That’s kind of the beginning of this movement to reassess the fundamental myths of psychoanalysis or the things we didn’t know were myths but certainly we now know are myths. I call it really the beginning of critical Freud studies. I take it to be a post-Jones movement, roughly from the mid-‘60s through to the late 1990s and maybe going on today, as well. I see it as like the whole purpose of scholarship and Freud studies is to move to critical Freud studies. Now how did it happen? It’s really amazing. One of the untold stories of psychoanalytic studies or Freud studies, as it’s usually called, is that one of the reasons there’s so much misinformation is that the vast majority of books published and that appear under the library heading of BF173 to BF175 roughly—go to any library and you’ll find all the Freud books there. Most of this work is vanity publishing. So much of the field is run by psychoanalysts who have positions of authority. They start their own book publishers. They start their own journals. Pretty soon they have an authority in the marketplace of ideas so it’s very, very hard to actually find in the thousands of books published on Freud anything that actually tells the truth. It’s a hard thing for somebody to free themselves from many, many misconceptions about Freud. You mentioned a couple of them. Freud manufactured evidence. One of the things that’s not well-appreciated is how Freud went out of his way to manipulate the reception of his own work, right? He wrote his own histories, first of all. Many times he revised his own histories and sometimes there are discrepancies with his own histories. He was always trying to spin his history in advance because Freud always perceived himself as an historically important person, so he proceeded accordingly. He destroyed some of his correspondence. He would destroy some of his process notes that he used to create his famous case studies, of which there really is only four that he wrote, all of which are failures, by the way. He destroyed the notes and these were important cases. You’d think you’d keep them but he destroyed them. He tried to get his famous letters with Wilhelm Fliess destroyed but Marie Bonaparte preserved them against his wishes. So Freud was always interested in manipulating the reception of his work and he was largely successful in many ways. People have generally believed what he said.

Freud fabricated evidence-- but his “cult” following refuses to accept his invalidity

Dufresne 15, social and cultural theorist best-known for his work on Sigmund Freud and the history of psychoanalysis, Professor of Philosophy at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario and the author of multiple books about Freud and psychoanalysis, (Todd, January 2015, 235. DR. TODD DUFRESNE ON FREUD’S LOOMING SHADOW OF DECEPTION, http://www.skeptiko.com/235-todd-dufresne-freud-deception/)//kap
Alex Tsakiris: Can we stop right there? One of the things I always like to do when we get into these discussions with people and I have just a very superficial understanding of this stuff—you could get into it in much greater detail. I always stop at this point and say, “What would that look like in modern academic standards?” Just what we already know there. What would that look like if any intellectual, academic figure of our time was known to have done those things? I can’t imagine but that they would be completely ostracized as just the beginning of it. They’d be a complete joke. Dr. Todd Dufresne: The problem is, Alex, that’s there’s hardly any modern equivalent to Freud. What Freud got away with for so long, which is essentially passing off incomplete results or fraudulent results as the truth—I can give you some examples as we get into it later. He did all of the things you said he did. He manufactured evidence and even the evidence that he had, he may have felt legitimately and honestly is so shot-through with epistemological problems because there’s the contamination of results by the expectations he had on the patients. We know this is called “suggestion,” right? And undue influence. One of the things that’s interesting about Freud is that he was a scientist and as a scientist he had followers. These followers routinely referred to his major works like The Interpretation of Dreams as their “bibles.” So we’re already in Freud’s life in the presence of a kind of cult or church or something that’s not scientific. This guy was a trained neurologist, right? He asked some legitimate questions. He explored these questions but at some point ambition took over and he fudged the results in many ways like you’re saying. What should happen with Freud is the minute people see that he fudged the results in a number of ways that are absolutely clear—there’s no question—well, anybody that has any fair-mindedness would say that everything that follows from these results is therefore questionable. But that’s not what happens with Freud, and that’s because we’re in the presence of a belief system, like a religion, so people don’t want to question it. Anything like this today, you’d lose tenure. You’d lose your job. When this happens people fall into disgrace. But Freud has never really seriously fallen into disgrace. One of the things that’s happened which is amazing to me because I’m somebody who works in the humanities is that part of the blame belongs to people in the humanities and social sciences that don’t really care about science, or in some ways truth, not to be too general about it. They don’t care that maybe he fudged the results; they’re just interested in this as a hermeneutic system, a way of interpreting the world. So this is the place we get, where people are really non-skeptical about Freud and they don’t want to hear it, you know? They do not want to hear it. And that’s my colleagues, I’m afraid.