Reject psychoanalysis---it’s totally fabricated and perpetuated by complicit scholars who distort truth

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.¶ 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. You’d be fired. 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.