Sigmund Freud (1856—1939)

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was a

physiologist, medical doctor, psychologist and influen-
tial thinker of the early twentieth century. Working ini-
tially in close collaboration with Joseph Breuer, Freud
elaborated the theory that the mind is a complex ener-
gy-system, the structural investigation of which is the
proper province of psychology. He articulated and re-
fined the concepts of the unconscious, infantile sexuali-
ty and repression, and he proposed a tripartite account
of the mind’s structure—all as part of a radically new
conceptual and therapeutic frame of reference for the
understanding of human psychological development
and the treatment of abnormal mental conditions. Not-
withstanding the multiple manifestations of psycho-
analysis as it exists today, it can in almost all fundamental respects be traced directly back
to Freud’s original work.

Freud’s innovative treatment of human actions, dreams, and indeed of cultural artifacts
as invariably possessing implicit symbolic significance has proven to be extraordinarily
fruitful, and has had massive implications for a wide variety of fields including psycholo-
gy, anthropology, semiotics, and artistic creativity and appreciation. However, Freud’s
most important and frequently re-iterated claim, that with psychoanalysis he had invent-
ed a successful science of the mind, remains the subject of much critical debate and
controversy.

Table of Contents
 1. Life
2. Backdrop to His Thought
3. The Theory of the Unconscious
4. Infantile Sexuality
5. Neuroses and the Structure of the Mind
6. Psychoanalysis as a Therapy
7. Critical Evaluation of Freud
a. The Claim to Scientific Status
b. The Coherence of the Theory
c. Freud’s Discovery
d. The Efficacy of Psychoanalytic Therapy
8. References and Further Reading
a. Works by Freud
b. Works on Freud and Freudian Psychoanalysis

1. Life
Freud was born in Frieberg, Moravia in 1856, but when he was four years old his family
moved to Vienna where he was to live and work until the last years of his life. In 1938 the
Nazis annexed Austria, and Freud, who was Jewish, was allowed to leave for England. For
these reasons, it was above all with the city of Vienna that Freud’s name was destined to
be deeply associated for posterity, founding as he did what was to become known as the
first Viennese school of psychoanalysis from which flowed psychoanalysis as a movement
and all subsequent developments in this field. The scope of Freud’s interests, and of his
professional training, was very broad. He always considered himself first and foremost a
scientist, endeavoring to extend the compass of human knowledge, and to this end (rather
than to the practice of medicine) he enrolled at the medical school at the University of Vi-
enna in 1873. He concentrated initially on biology, doing research in physiology for six
years under the great German scientist Ernst Brücke, who was director of the Physiology
Laboratory at the University, and thereafter specializing in neurology. He received his
medical degree in 1881, and having become engaged to be married in 1882, he rather re-
luctantly took up more secure and financially rewarding work as a doctor at Vienna Gen-
eral Hospital. Shortly after his marriage in 1886, which was extremely happy and gave
Freud six children—the youngest of whom, Anna, was to herself become a distinguished
psychoanalyst—Freud set up a private practice in the treatment of psychological disor-
ders, which gave him much of the clinical material that he based his theories and pioneer-
ing techniques on.

In 1885-86, Freud spent the greater part of a year in Paris, where he was deeply im-
pressed by the work of the French neurologist Jean Charcot who was at that time using
hypnotism to treat hysteria and other abnormal mental conditions. When he returned to
Vienna, Freud experimented with hypnosis but found that its beneficial effects did not
last. At this point he decided to adopt instead a method suggested by the work of an older
Viennese colleague and friend, Josef Breuer, who had discovered that when he encour-
aged a hysterical patient to talk uninhibitedly about the earliest occurrences of the symp-
toms, they sometimes gradually abated. Working with Breuer, Freud formulated and de-
veloped the idea that many neuroses (phobias, hysterical paralysis and pains, some forms
of paranoia, and so forth) had their origins in deeply traumatic experiences which had oc-
curred in the patient’s past but which were now forgotten—hidden from consciousness.
The treatment was to enable the patient to recall the experience to consciousness, to con-
front it in a deep way both intellectually and emotionally, and in thus discharging it, to re-
move the underlying psychological causes of the neurotic symptoms. This technique, and
the theory from which it is derived, was given its classical expression in Studies in Hyste-
ria, jointly published by Freud and Breuer in 1895.

Shortly thereafter, however, Breuer found that he could not agree with what he regarded
as the excessive emphasis which Freud placed upon the sexual origins and content of neu-
roses, and the two parted company, with Freud continuing to work alone to develop and
refine the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. In 1900, after a protracted period of self-
analysis, he published The Interpretation of Dreams, which is generally regarded as his
greatest work. This was followed in 1901 by The Psychopathology of Everyday Life; and
in 1905 by Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory was
initially not well received—when its existence was acknowledged at all it was usually by
people who were, as Breuer had foreseen, scandalized by the emphasis placed on sexuality
by Freud. It was not until 1908, when the first International Psychoanalytical Congress
was held at Salzburg that Freud’s importance began to be generally recognized. This was
greatly facilitated in 1909, when he was invited to give a course of lectures in the United
States, which were to form the basis of his 1916 book Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis.
From this point on Freud’s reputation and fame grew enormously, and he continued to
write prolifically until his death, producing in all more than twenty volumes of theoretical
works and clinical studies. He was also not averse to critically revising his views, or to
making fundamental alterations to his most basic principles when he considered that the
scientific evidence demanded it—this was most clearly evidenced by his advancement of a
completely new tripartite (id, ego, and super-ego) model of the mind in his 1923 work The
Ego and the Id. He was initially greatly heartened by attracting followers of the intellectu-
al caliber of Adler and Jung, and was correspondingly disappointed when they both went
on to found rival schools of psychoanalysis—thus giving rise to the first two of many
schisms in the movement—but he knew that such disagreement over basic principles had
been part of the early development of every new science. After a life of remarkable vigor
and creative productivity, he died of cancer while exiled in England in 1939.

2. Backdrop to His Thought

Although a highly original thinker, Freud was also deeply influenced by a number of di-
verse factors which overlapped and interconnected with each other to shape the develop-
ment of his thought. As indicated above, both Charcot and Breuer had a direct and imme-
diate impact upon him, but some of the other factors, though no less important than
these, were of a rather different nature. First of all, Freud himself was very much a
Freudian—his father had two sons by a previous marriage, Emmanuel and Philip, and the
young Freud often played with Philip’s son John, who was his own age. Freud’s self-analy-
sis, which forms the core of his masterpiece The Interpretation of Dreams, originated in
the emotional crisis which he suffered on the death of his father and the series of dreams
to which this gave rise. This analysis revealed to him that the love and admiration which
he had felt for his father were mixed with very contrasting feelings of shame and hate
(such a mixed attitude he termed ambivalence). Particularly revealing was his discovery
that he had often fantasized as a youth that his half-brother Philip (who was of an age
with his mother) was really his father, and certain other signs convinced him of the deep
underlying meaning of this fantasy—that he had wished his real father dead because he
was his rival for his mother’s affections. This was to become the personal (though by no
means exclusive) basis for his theory of the Oedipus complex.

Secondly, and at a more general level, account must be taken of the contemporary scien-
tific climate in which Freud lived and worked. In most respects, the towering scientific
figure of nineteenth century science was Charles Darwin, who had published his revolu-
tionary Origin of Species when Freud was four years old. The evolutionary doctrine radi-
cally altered the prevailing conception of man—whereas before, man had been seen as a
being different in nature from the members of the animal kingdom by virtue of his pos-
session of an immortal soul, he was now seen as being part of the natural order, different
from non-human animals only in degree of structural complexity. This made it possible
and plausible, for the first time, to treat man as an object of scientific investigation, and to
conceive of the vast and varied range of human behavior, and the motivational causes
from which it springs, as being amenable in principle to scientific explanation. Much of
the creative work done in a whole variety of diverse scientific fields over the next century
was to be inspired by, and derive sustenance from, this new world-view, which Freud with
his enormous esteem for science, accepted implicitly.

An even more important influence on Freud however, came from the field of physics. The
second fifty years of the nineteenth century saw monumental advances in contemporary
physics, which were largely initiated by the formulation of the principle of the conserva-
tion of energy by Helmholz. This principle states, in effect, that the total amount of energy
in any given physical system is always constant, that energy quanta can be changed but
not annihilated, and that consequently when energy is moved from one part of the sys-
tem, it must reappear in another part. The progressive application of this principle led to
monumental discoveries in the fields of thermodynamics, electromagnetism and nuclear
physics which, with their associated technologies, have so comprehensively transformed
the contemporary world. As we have seen, when he first came to the University of Vienna,
Freud worked under the direction of Ernst Brücke who in 1873-4 published his Lecture
Notes on Physiology (Vorlesungen über Physiologie. Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller), set-
ting out the view that all living organisms, including humans, are essentially energy-sys-
tems to which, no less than to inanimate objects, the principle of the conservation of ener-
gy applies. Freud, who had great admiration and respect for Brücke, quickly adopted this
new dynamic physiology with enthusiasm. From there it was but a short conceptual step
—but one which Freud was the first to take, and on which his claim to fame is largely
grounded—to the view that there is such a thing as psychic energy, that the human per-
sonality is also an energy-system, and that it is the function of psychology to investigate
the modifications, transmissions and conversions of psychic energy within the personality
which shape and determine it. This latter conception is the very cornerstone of Freud’s
psychoanalytic theory.
3. The Theory of the Unconscious
Freud’s theory of the unconscious, then, is highly deterministic—a fact which, given the
nature of nineteenth century science, should not be surprising. Freud was arguably the
first thinker to apply deterministic principles systematically to the sphere of the mental,
and to hold that the broad spectrum of human behavior is explicable only in terms of the
(usually hidden) mental processes or states which determine it. Thus, instead of treating
the behavior of the neurotic as being causally inexplicable—which had been the prevailing
approach for centuries—Freud insisted, on the contrary, on treating it as behavior for
which it is meaningful to seek an explanation by searching for causes in terms of the
mental states of the individual concerned. Hence the significance which he attributed to
slips of the tongue or pen, obsessive behavior and dreams—all these, he held, are deter-
mined by hidden causes in the person’s mind, and so they reveal in covert form what
would otherwise not be known at all. This suggests the view that freedom of the will is, if
not completely an illusion, certainly more tightly circumscribed than is commonly be-
lieved, for it follows from this that whenever we make a choice we are governed by hidden
mental processes of which we are unaware and over which we have no control.

The postulate that there are such things as unconscious mental states at all is a direct
function of Freud’s determinism, his reasoning here being simply that the principle of
causality requires that such mental states should exist, for it is evident that there is fre-
quently nothing in the conscious mind which can be said to cause neurotic or other be-
havior. An unconscious mental process or event, for Freud, is not one which merely hap-
pens to be out of consciousness at a given time, but is rather one which cannot, except
through protracted psychoanalysis, be brought to the forefront of consciousness. The pos-
tulation of such unconscious mental states entails, of course, that the mind is not, and
cannot be, either identified with consciousness, or an object of consciousness. To employ
a much-used analogy, it is rather structurally akin to an iceberg, the bulk of it lying below
the surface, exerting a dynamic and determining influence upon the part which is
amenable to direct inspection—the conscious mind.

Deeply associated with this view of the mind is Freud’s account of instincts or drives. In-
stincts, for Freud, are the principal motivating forces in the mental realm, and as such
they energise the mind in all of its functions. There are, he held, an indefinitely large
number of such instincts, but these can be reduced to a small number of basic ones, which
he grouped into two broad generic categories, Eros (the life instinct), which covers all the
self-preserving and erotic instincts, and Thanatos (the death instinct), which covers all
the instincts towards aggression, self-destruction, and cruelty. Thus it is a mistake to in-
terpret Freud as asserting that all human actions spring from motivations which are sexu-
al in their origin, since those which derive from Thanatos are not sexually motivated—in-
deed, Thanatos is the irrational urge to destroy the source of all sexual energy in the anni-
hilation of the self. Having said that, it is undeniably true that Freud gave sexual drives an
importance and centrality in human life, human actions, and human behavior which was
new (and to many, shocking), arguing as he does that sexual drives exist and can be dis-
cerned in children from birth (the theory of infantile sexuality), and that sexual energy
(libido) is the single most important motivating force in adult life. However, a crucial
qualification has to be added here—Freud effectively redefined the term sexuality to make
it cover any form of pleasure which is or can be derived from the body. Thus his theory of
the instincts or drives is essentially that the human being is energized or driven from
birth by the desire to acquire and enhance bodily pleasure.

4. Infantile Sexuality
Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality must be seen as an integral part of a broader develop-
mental theory of human personality. This had its origins in, and was a generalization of,
Breuer’s earlier discovery that traumatic childhood events could have devastating nega-
tive effects upon the adult individual, and took the form of the general thesis that early
childhood sexual experiences were the crucial factors in the determination of the adult
personality. From his account of the instincts or drives it followed that from the moment
of birth the infant is driven in his actions by the desire for bodily/sexual pleasure, where
this is seen by Freud in almost mechanical terms as the desire to release mental energy.
Initially, infants gain such release, and derive such pleasure, from the act of sucking.
Freud accordingly terms this the oral stage of development. This is followed by a stage in
which the locus of pleasure or energy release is the anus, particularly in the act of defeca-
tion, and this is accordingly termed the anal stage. Then the young child develops an in-
terest in its sexual organs as a site of pleasure (the phallic stage), and develops a deep sex-
ual attraction for the parent of the opposite sex, and a hatred of the parent of the same sex
(the Oedipus complex). This, however, gives rise to (socially derived) feelings of guilt in
the child, who recognizes that it can never supplant the stronger parent. A male child also
perceives himself to be at risk. He fears that if he persists in pursuing the sexual attraction
for his mother, he may be harmed by the father; specifically, he comes to fear that he may
be castrated. This is termed castration anxiety. Both the attraction for the mother and the
hatred are usually repressed, and the child usually resolves the conflict of the Oedipus
complex by coming to identify with the parent of the same sex. This happens at the age of
five, whereupon the child enters a latency period, in which sexual motivations become
much less pronounced. This lasts until puberty when mature genital development begins,
and the pleasure drive refocuses around the genital area.

This, Freud believed, is the sequence or progression implicit in normal human develop-
ment, and it is to be observed that at the infant level the instinctual attempts to satisfy the
pleasure drive are frequently checked by parental control and social coercion. The devel-
opmental process, then, is for the child essentially a movement through a series of con-
flicts, the successful resolution of which is crucial to adult mental health. Many mental ill-
nesses, particularly hysteria, Freud held, can be traced back to unresolved conflicts expe-
rienced at this stage, or to events which otherwise disrupt the normal pattern of infantile
development. For example, homosexuality is seen by some Freudians as resulting from a
failure to resolve the conflicts of the Oedipus complex, particularly a failure to identify
with the parent of the same sex; the obsessive concern with washing and personal hygiene
which characterizes the behavior of some neurotics is seen as resulting from unresolved
conflicts/repressions occurring at the anal stage.

5. Neuroses and the Structure of the Mind

Freud’s account of the unconscious, and the psychoanalytic therapy associated with it, is
best illustrated by his famous tripartite model of the structure of the mind or personality
(although, as we have seen, he did not formulate this until 1923). This model has many
points of similarity with the account of the mind offered by Plato over 2,000 years earlier.
The theory is termed tripartite simply because, again like Plato, Freud distinguished
three structural elements within the mind, which he called id, ego, and super-ego. The id
is that part of the mind in which are situated the instinctual sexual drives which require
satisfaction; the super-ego is that part which contains the conscience, namely, socially-
acquired control mechanisms which have been internalized, and which are usually im-
parted in the first instance by the parents; while the ego is the conscious self that is creat-
ed by the dynamic tensions and interactions between the id and the super-ego and has the
task of reconciling their conflicting demands with the requirements of external reality. It
is in this sense that the mind is to be understood as a dynamic energy-system. All objects
of consciousness reside in the ego; the contents of the id belong permanently to the un-
conscious mind; while the super-ego is an unconscious screening-mechanism which seeks
to limit the blind pleasure-seeking drives of the id by the imposition of restrictive rules.
There is some debate as to how literally Freud intended this model to be taken (he ap-
pears to have taken it extremely literally himself), but it is important to note that what is
being offered here is indeed a theoretical model rather than a description of an observ-
able object, which functions as a frame of reference to explain the link between early
childhood experience and the mature adult (normal or dysfunctional) personality.

Freud also followed Plato in his account of the nature of mental health or psychological
well-being, which he saw as the establishment of a harmonious relationship between the
three elements which constitute the mind. If the external world offers no scope for the
satisfaction of the id’s pleasure drives, or more commonly, if the satisfaction of some or all
of these drives would indeed transgress the moral sanctions laid down by the super-ego,
then an inner conflict occurs in the mind between its constituent parts or elements. Fail-
ure to resolve this can lead to later neurosis. A key concept introduced here by Freud is
that the mind possesses a number of defense mechanisms to attempt to prevent conflicts
from becoming too acute, such as repression (pushing conflicts back into the uncon-
scious), sublimation (channeling the sexual drives into the achievement socially accept-
able goals, in art, science, poetry, and so forth), fixation (the failure to progress beyond
one of the developmental stages), and regression (a return to the behavior characteristic
of one of the stages).

Of these, repression is the most important, and Freud’s account of this is as follows: when
a person experiences an instinctual impulse to behave in a manner which the super-ego
deems to be reprehensible (for example, a strong erotic impulse on the part of the child
towards the parent of the opposite sex), then it is possible for the mind to push this im-
pulse away, to repress it into the unconscious. Repression is thus one of the central de-
fense mechanisms by which the ego seeks to avoid internal conflict and pain, and to rec-
oncile reality with the demands of both id and super-ego. As such it is completely normal
and an integral part of the developmental process through which every child must pass on
the way to adulthood. However, the repressed instinctual drive, as an energy-form, is not
and cannot be destroyed when it is repressed—it continues to exist intact in the uncon-
scious, from where it exerts a determining force upon the conscious mind, and can give
rise to the dysfunctional behavior characteristic of neuroses. This is one reason why
dreams and slips of the tongue possess such a strong symbolic significance for Freud, and
why their analysis became such a key part of his treatment—they represent instances in
which the vigilance of the super-ego is relaxed, and when the repressed drives are accord-
ingly able to present themselves to the conscious mind in a transmuted form. The differ-
ence between normal repression and the kind of repression which results in neurotic ill-
ness is one of degree, not of kind—the compulsive behavior of the neurotic is itself a man-
ifestation of an instinctual drive repressed in childhood. Such behavioral symptoms are
highly irrational (and may even be perceived as such by the neurotic), but are completely
beyond the control of the subject because they are driven by the now unconscious re-
pressed impulse. Freud positioned the key repressions for both, the normal individual
and the neurotic, in the first five years of childhood, and of course, held them to be essen-
tially sexual in nature; since, as we have seen, repressions which disrupt the process of in-
fantile sexual development in particular, according to him, lead to a strong tendency to
later neurosis in adult life. The task of psychoanalysis as a therapy is to find the repres-
sions which cause the neurotic symptoms by delving into the unconscious mind of the
subject, and by bringing them to the forefront of consciousness, to allow the ego to con-
front them directly and thus to discharge them.

6. Psychoanalysis as a Therapy
Freud’s account of the sexual genesis and nature of neuroses led him naturally to develop
a clinical treatment for treating such disorders. This has become so influential today that
when people speak of psychoanalysis they frequently refer exclusively to the clinical treat-
ment; however, the term properly designates both the clinical treatment and the theory
which underlies it. The aim of the method may be stated simply in general terms—to re-
establish a harmonious relationship between the three elements which constitute the
mind by excavating and resolving unconscious repressed conflicts. The actual method of
treatment pioneered by Freud grew out of Breuer’s earlier discovery, mentioned above,
that when a hysterical patient was encouraged to talk freely about the earliest occurrences
of her symptoms and fantasies, the symptoms began to abate, and were eliminated entire-
ly when she was induced to remember the initial trauma which occasioned them. Turning
away from his early attempts to explore the unconscious through hypnosis, Freud further
developed this talking cure, acting on the assumption that the repressed conflicts were
buried in the deepest recesses of the unconscious mind. Accordingly, he got his patients to
relax in a position in which they were deprived of strong sensory stimulation, and even
keen awareness of the presence of the analyst (hence the famous use of the couch, with
the analyst virtually silent and out of sight), and then encouraged them to speak freely
and uninhibitedly, preferably without forethought, in the belief that he could thereby dis-
cern the unconscious forces lying behind what was said. This is the method of free-associ-
ation, the rationale for which is similar to that involved in the analysis of dreams—in both
cases the super-ego is to some degree disarmed, its efficiency as a screening mechanism is
moderated, and material is allowed to filter through to the conscious ego which would
otherwise be completely repressed. The process is necessarily a difficult and protracted
one, and it is therefore one of the primary tasks of the analyst to help the patient recog-
nize, and overcome, his own natural resistances, which may exhibit themselves as hostili-
ty towards the analyst. However, Freud always took the occurrence of resistance as a sign
that he was on the right track in his assessment of the underlying unconscious causes of
the patient’s condition. The patient’s dreams are of particular interest, for reasons which
we have already partly seen. Taking it that the super-ego functioned less effectively in
sleep, as in free-association, Freud made a distinction between the manifest content of a
dream (what the dream appeared to be about on the surface) and its latent content (the
unconscious, repressed desires or wishes which are its real object). The correct interpreta-
tion of the patient’s dreams, slips of tongue, free-associations, and responses to carefully
selected questions leads the analyst to a point where he can locate the unconscious re-
pressions producing the neurotic symptoms, invariably in terms of the patient’s passage
through the sexual developmental process, the manner in which the conflicts implicit in
this process were handled, and the libidinal content of the patient’s family relationships.
To create a cure, the analyst must facilitate the patient himself to become conscious of un-
resolved conflicts buried in the deep recesses of the unconscious mind, and to confront
and engage with them directly.

In this sense, then, the object of psychoanalytic treatment may be said to be a form of self-
understanding—once this is acquired it is largely up to the patient, in consultation with
the analyst, to determine how he shall handle this newly-acquired understanding of the
unconscious forces which motivate him. One possibility, mentioned above, is the channel-
ing of sexual energy into the achievement of social, artistic or scientific goals—this is sub-
limation, which Freud saw as the motivating force behind most great cultural achieve-
ments. Another possibility would be the conscious, rational control of formerly repressed
drives—this is suppression. Yet another would be the decision that it is the super-ego and
the social constraints which inform it that are at fault, in which case the patient may de-
cide in the end to satisfy the instinctual drives. But in all cases the cure is created essen-
tially by a kind of catharsis or purgation—a release of the pent-up psychic energy, the con-
striction of which was the basic cause of the neurotic illness.

7. Critical Evaluation of Freud

It should be evident from the foregoing why psychoanalysis in general, and Freud in par-
ticular, have exerted such a strong influence upon the popular imagination in the Western
World, and why both the theory and practice of psychoanalysis should remain the object
of a great deal of controversy. In fact, the controversy which exists in relation to Freud is
more heated and multi-faceted than that relating to virtually any other post-1850 thinker
(a possible exception being Darwin), with criticisms ranging from the contention that
Freud’s theory was generated by logical confusions arising out of his alleged long-stand-
ing addiction to cocaine (see Thornton, E.M. Freud and Cocaine: The Freudian Fallacy)
to the view that he made an important, but grim, empirical discovery, which he knowingly
suppressed in favour of the theory of the unconscious, knowing that the latter would be
more socially acceptable (see Masson, J. The Assault on Truth).

It should be emphasized here that Freud’s genius is not (generally) in doubt, but the pre-
cise nature of his achievement is still the source of much debate. The supporters and fol-
lowers of Freud (and Jung and Adler) are noted for the zeal and enthusiasm with which
they espouse the doctrines of the master, to the point where many of the detractors of the
movement see it as a kind of secular religion, requiring as it does an initiation process in
which the aspiring psychoanalyst must himself first be analyzed. In this way, it is often al-
leged, the unquestioning acceptance of a set of ideological principles becomes a necessary
precondition for acceptance into the movement—as with most religious groupings. In re-
ply, the exponents and supporters of psychoanalysis frequently analyze the motivations of
their critics in terms of the very theory which those critics reject. And so the debate goes
on.

Here we will confine ourselves to: (a) the evaluation of Freud’s claim that his theory is a
scientific one, (b) the question of the theory’s coherence, (c) the dispute concerning what,
if anything, Freud really discovered, and (d) the question of the efficacy of psychoanalysis
as a treatment for neurotic illnesses.
a. The Claim to Scientific Status
This is a crucially important issue since Freud saw himself first and foremost as a pioneer-
ing scientist, and repeatedly asserted that the significance of psychoanalysis is that it is a
new science, incorporating a new scientific method of dealing with the mind and with
mental illness. There can, moreover, be no doubt but that this has been the chief attrac-
tion of the theory for most of its advocates since then—on the face of it, it has the appear-
ance of being not just a scientific theory but an enormously strong one, with the capacity
to accommodate, and explain, every possible form of human behavior. However, it is pre-
cisely this latter which, for many commentators, undermines its claim to scientific status.
On the question of what makes a theory a genuinely scientific one, Karl Popper’s criterion
of demarcation, as it is called, has now gained very general acceptance: namely, that every
genuine scientific theory must be testable, and therefore falsifiable, at least in principle.
In other words, if a theory is incompatible with possible observations, it is scientific; con-
versely, a theory which is compatible with all possible observations is unscientific (see
Popper, K. The Logic of Scientific Discovery). Thus the principle of the conservation of
energy (physical, not psychic), which influenced Freud so greatly, is a scientific one be-
cause it is falsifiable—the discovery of a physical system in which the total amount of
physical energy was not constant would conclusively show it to be false. It is argued that
nothing of the kind is possible with respect to Freud’s theory—it is not falsifiable. If the
question is asked: “What does this theory imply which, if false, would show the whole the-
ory to be false?,” the answer is “Nothing” because the theory is compatible with every
possible state of affairs. Hence it is concluded that the theory is not scientific, and while
this does not, as some critics claim, rob it of all value, it certainly diminishes its intellectu-
al status as projected by its strongest advocates, including Freud himself.

b. The Coherence of the Theory

A related (but perhaps more serious) point is that the coherence of the theory is, at the
very least, questionable. What is attractive about the theory, even to the layman, is that it
seems to offer us long sought-after and much needed causal explanations for conditions
which have been a source of a great deal of human misery. The thesis that neuroses are
caused by unconscious conflicts buried deep in the unconscious mind in the form of re-
pressed libidinal energy would appear to offer us, at last, an insight in the causal mecha-
nism underlying these abnormal psychological conditions as they are expressed in human
behavior, and further show us how they are related to the psychology of the normal per-
son. However, even this is questionable, and is a matter of much dispute. In general,
when it is said that an event X causes another event Y to happen, both X and Y are, and
must be, independently identifiable. It is true that this is not always a simple process, as
in science causes are sometimes unobservable (sub-atomic particles, radio and electro-
magnetic waves, molecular structures, and so forth), but in these latter cases there are
clear correspondence rules connecting the unobservable causes with observable phenom-
ena. The difficulty with Freud’s theory is that it offers us entities (for example repressed
unconscious conflicts), which are said to be the unobservable causes of certain forms of
behavior But there are no correspondence rules for these alleged causes—they cannot be
identified except by reference to the behavior which they are said to cause (that is, the an-
alyst does not demonstratively assert: “This is the unconscious cause, and that is its be-
havioral effect;” rather he asserts: “This is the behavior, therefore its unconscious cause
must exist”), and this does raise serious doubts as to whether Freud’s theory offers us
genuine causal explanations at all.

c. Freud’s Discovery
At a less theoretical, but no less critical level, it has been alleged that Freud did make a
genuine discovery which he was initially prepared to reveal to the world. However, the re-
sponse he encountered was so ferociously hostile that he masked his findings and offered
his theory of the unconscious in its place (see Masson, J. The Assault on Truth). What he
discovered, it has been suggested, was the extreme prevalence of child sexual abuse, par-
ticularly of young girls (the vast majority of hysterics are women), even in respectable
nineteenth century Vienna. He did in fact offer an early seduction theory of neuroses,
which met with fierce animosity, and which he quickly withdrew and replaced with the
theory of the unconscious. As one contemporary Freudian commentator explains it,
Freud’s change of mind on this issue came about as follows:

Questions concerning the traumas suffered by his patients seemed to reveal [to
Freud] that Viennese girls were extraordinarily often seduced in very early childhood
by older male relatives. Doubt about the actual occurrence of these seductions was
soon replaced by certainty that it was descriptions about childhood fantasy that were
being offered. (MacIntyre).
In this way, it is suggested, the theory of the Oedipus complex was generated.

This statement begs a number of questions, not least, what does the expression extraordi-
narily often mean in this context? By what standard is this being judged? The answer can
only be: By the standard of what we generally believe—or would like to believe—to be the
case. But the contention of some of Freud’s critics here is that his patients were not recall-
ing childhood fantasies, but traumatic events from their childhood which were all too
real. Freud, according to them, had stumbled upon and knowingly suppressed the fact
that the level of child sexual abuse in society is much higher than is generally believed or
acknowledged. If this contention is true—and it must at least be contemplated seriously—
then this is undoubtedly the most serious criticism that Freud and his followers have to
face.

Further, this particular point has taken on an added and even more controversial signifi-
cance in recent years, with the willingness of some contemporary Freudians to combine
the theory of repression with an acceptance of the wide-spread social prevalence of child
sexual abuse. The result has been that in the United States and Britain in particular, many
thousands of people have emerged from analysis with recovered memories of alleged
childhood sexual abuse by their parents; memories which, it is suggested, were hitherto
repressed. On this basis, parents have been accused and repudiated, and whole families
have been divided or destroyed. Unsurprisingly, this in turn has given rise to a systematic
backlash in which organizations of accused parents, seeing themselves as the true victims
of what they term False Memory Syndrome, have denounced all such memory-claims as
falsidical — the direct product of a belief in what they see as the myth of repression. (see
Pendergast, M. Victims of Memory). In this way, the concept of repression, which Freud
himself termed the foundation stone upon which the structure of psychoanalysis rests,
has come in for more widespread critical scrutiny than ever before. Here, the fact that,
unlike some of his contemporary followers, Freud did not himself ever countenance the
extension of the concept of repression to cover actual child sexual abuse, and the fact that
we are not necessarily forced to choose between the views that all recovered memories are
either veridical or falsidical are frequently lost sight of in the extreme heat generated by
this debate, perhaps understandably.

d. The Efficacy of Psychoanalytic Therapy

It does not follow that, if Freud’s theory is unscientific, or even false, it cannot provide us
with a basis for the beneficial treatment of neurotic illness because the relationship be-
tween a theory’s truth or falsity and its utility-value is far from being an isomorphic one.
The theory upon which the use of leeches to bleed patients in eighteenth century medicine
was based was quite spurious, but patients did sometimes actually benefit from the treat-
ment! And of course even a true theory might be badly applied, leading to negative conse-
quences. One of the problems here is that it is difficult to specify what counts as a cure for
a neurotic illness as distinct, say, from a mere alleviation of the symptoms. In general,
however, the efficiency of a given method of treatment is usually clinically measured by
means of a control group—the proportion of patients suffering from a given disorder who
are cured by treatment X is measured by comparison with those cured by other treat-
ments, or by no treatment at all. Such clinical tests as have been conducted indicate that
the proportion of patients who have benefited from psychoanalytic treatment does not di-
verge significantly from the proportion who recover spontaneously or as a result of other
forms of intervention in the control groups used. So, the question of the therapeutic effec-
tiveness of psychoanalysis remains an open and controversial one.

8. References and Further Reading

a. Works by Freud
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Ed. J. Strachey with
Anna Freud), 24 vols. London: 1953-1964.

b. Works on Freud and Freudian Psychoanalysis

Abramson, J.B. Liberation and Its Limits: The Moral and Political Thought of Freud. New York:
Free Press, 1984.
Bettlelheim, B. Freud and Man’s Soul. Knopf, 1982.
Cavell, M. The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to Philosophy. Harvard University Press, 1993.
Cavell, M. Becoming a Subject: Reflections in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006.
Chessick, R.D. Freud Teaches Psychotherapy. Hackett Publishing Company, 1980.
Cioffi, F. (ed.) Freud: Modern Judgements. Macmillan, 1973.
Deigh, J. The Sources of Moral Agency: Essays in Moral Psychology and Freudian Theory. Cam-
 bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Dilman, I. Freud and Human Nature. Blackwell, 1983
Dilman, I. Freud and the Mind. Blackwell, 1984.
Edelson, M. Hypothesis and Evidence in Psychoanalysis. University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Erwin, E. A Final Accounting: Philosophical and Empirical Issues in Freudian Psychology. MIT
Press, 1996.
Fancher, R. Psychoanalytic Psychology: The Development of Freud’s Thought. Norton, 1973.
Farrell, B.A. The Standing of Psychoanalysis. Oxford University Press, 1981.
Fingarette, H. The Self in Transformation: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and the Life of the Spirit.
HarperCollins, 1977.
Freeman, L. The Story of Anna O.—The Woman who led Freud to Psychoanalysis. Paragon House,
1990.
Frosh, S. The Politics of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction to Freudian and Post-Freudian Theory.
Yale University Press, 1987.
Gardner, S. Irrationality and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1993.
Grünbaum, A. The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique. University of California
Press, 1984.
Gay, V.P. Freud on Sublimation: Reconsiderations. Albany, NY: State University Press, 1992.
Hook, S. (ed.) Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method, and Philosophy. New York University Press, 1959.
Jones, E. Sigmund Freud: Life and Work (3 vols), Basic Books, 1953-1957.
Klein, G.S. Psychoanalytic Theory: An Exploration of Essentials. International Universities Press,
1976.
Lear, J. Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990.
Lear, J. Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul. Cambridge, Harvard University Press,
1998.
Lear, Jonathan. Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life. Harvard University Press, 2000.
Lear, Jonathan. Freud. Routledge, 2005.
Levine, M.P. (ed). The Analytic Freud: Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 2000.
Levy, D. Freud Among the Philosophers: The Psychoanalytic Unconscious and Its Philosophical
Critics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
MacIntyre, A.C. The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958.
Mahony, P.J. Freud’s Dora: A Psychoanalytic, Historical and Textual Study. Yale University Press,
1996.
Masson, J. The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory. Faber & Faber, 1984.
Neu, J. (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Freud. Cambridge University Press, 1994.
O’Neill, J. (ed). Freud and the Passions. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.
Popper, K. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Hutchinson, 1959.
Pendergast, M. Victims of Memory. HarperCollins, 1997.
Reiser, M. Mind, Brain, Body: Towards a Convergence of Psychoanalysis and Neurobiology. Basic
Books, 1984.
Ricoeur, P. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation (trans. D. Savage). Yale University
Press, 1970.
Robinson, P. Freud and His Critics. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993.
Rose, J. On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World. Princeton University
Press, 2003.
Roth, P. The Superego. Icon Books, 2001.
Rudnytsky, P.L. Freud and Oedipus. Columbia University Press, 1987.
Said, E.W. Freud and the Non-European. Verso (in association with the Freud Museum, London),
2003.
Schafer, R. A New Language for Psychoanalysis. Yale University Press, 1976.
Sherwood, M. The Logic of Explanation in Psychoanalysis. Academic Press, 1969.
Smith, D.L. Freud’s Philosophy of the Unconscious. Kluwer, 1999.
Stewart, W. Psychoanalysis: The First Ten Years, 1888-1898. Macmillan, 1969.
Sulloway, F. Freud, Biologist of the Mind. Basic Books, 1979.
Thornton, E.M. Freud and Cocaine: The Freudian Fallacy. Blond & Briggs, 1983.
Tauber, A.I. Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher. Princeton University Press, 2010.
Wallace, E.R. Freud and Anthropology: A History and Reappraisal. International Universities Press,
1983.
Wallwork, E. Psychoanalysis and Ethics. Yale University Press, 1991.
Whitebrook, J. Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory. MIT Press,
1995.
Whyte, L.L. The Unconscious Before Freud. Basic Books, 1960.
Wollheim, R. Freud. Fontana, 1971.
Wollheim, R. (ed.) Freud: A Collection of Critical Essays. Anchor, 1974.
Wollheim, R. & Hopkins, J. (eds.) Philosophical Essays on Freud. Cambridge University Press, 1982.

See also the articles on Descartes’ Mind-Body Distinction, Higher-Order Theories of Con-
sciousness and Introspection.
Author Information
Stephen P. Thornton
University of Limerick
Ireland