The New York Review of Books

To the Editors:

In answering the objectors to his “The Unknown Freud,”. Frederick Crews wrote [Letters, NYR, February 3]: “To my knowledge, no modern analyst has renounced the cardinal Freudian investigative tool of ‘free association,’ which is inherently incapable of yielding knowledge about the determinants of dreams and symptoms” (p. 41, col. 2). Not to my knowledge, either, and for good reason: because the alleged inherent incapability has not been demonstrated. Instead of attempting to do that, Crews simply refers us to Macmillan’s Freud Evaluated, Chapter 15, which he calls “a devastating critique.”

The burden of that chapter is easily summarized. Macmillan reaches the radical conclusion that there “can not be any guidelines to how these data [those of the free association method] should be interpreted” (p. 549) because “the absence of a second script prevents any rules from ever being formulated” (p. 564). That is, taking as inherent to the psychoanalytic method Freud’s notion that for every manifest dream, there exists a latent dream the text (script) of which can be discovered, Macmillan makes the quite plausible argument that we have no way of ever directly accessing latent dreams. If that were the only possible way of devising guidelines for analyzing psychoanalytic data, then the conclusion—the inherent incapability of which Crews speaks—would indeed follow. But it is not, and hence Macmillan’s case collapses.

About fifty years ago, when I was learning the art of diagnostic psychological testing,¹ I was confronted with the task of reaching valid conclusions about the persons studied in personality research and about psychiatric patients on the basis of their free verbal responses to such projective techniques as the Rorschach ink blots and the pictures of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). The problem with the resulting data was that they were much more like free associations than like the results of administering intelligence tests or personality questionnaires. My mentors, Henry A. Murray and David Rapaport, were at that time fully aware of the pitfalls of psychoanalytic interpretation, which make analysts disagree with one another to an alarming extent, and had discovered a way out. I have since tried to detail it and to show its basic similarity to scientific method.²

The starting point is the realization that neither free association, the TAT or the Rorschach is a test—the sort of attempt to measure a specific aspect of personality or ability that we mean by that term. Hence, there is no single criterion, no independent measure of the same construct against which we can check the instrument we wish to validate. Instead, free association (and the projective techniques inspired by it) are sources of data, like interviewing or direct observation of behavior. Neither Crews nor Macmillan seems to have grasped this basic fact. But how should you work with such data? You can do so casually, irresponsibly, or in earnest ignorance of ways to do it with any control over manifold sources of error, as most psychoanalysts do. Or you can record your data objectively and analyze them in disciplined ways.

For that, you have to be clear on the difference between getting insights and checking them.³ Alas, not only the practitioners of psychoanalysis but many of their critics seem unaware that every science has two phases, which make quite different cognitive demands: first you have to get hunches, insights, or hypotheses; and then you have to test them. In the former, creative phase, there are and can be no complete rules; but that is true in all sciences. Kekule got the hypothesis of the ring structure at the heart of organic molecules in a dream-like reverie, but he realized that it was only a bright idea until it was checked against independent data. Not so easy, for at the time there did not exist the chemical equivalent of a “second script”—a direct method of seeing the carbon ring. So he had to draw inferences about what would happen in various chemical experiments if his surmise was correct or if other possible structures existed, and then check them out.

To work scientifically with psychoanalytic data, you have to make inferences from them (interpret them) and then attempt to refute those inferences by confronting them with additional, independent information. That is a great deal easier for clinical psychologists, who have at their disposal data from a variety of techniques of gathering relevant information, than it is for practicing psychoanalysts. It has been difficult for the latter to take seriously their plight: treating patients exposes them to extraordinarily rich data, but the nature of the situation restricts them to forming hypotheses for others to verify or refute. Moreover, scientific work on free associations requires that they be objectively recorded. Hence, Hartvig Dahl has for decades been attempting to persuade other psychoanalysts to join in assembling a library of tape-recorded psychoanalyses.⁴ With the complete transcript in hand, one can get consensual judgments on the degree to which any particular segment of data are contaminated by suggestion. All that Grünbaum has done—pace Crews—is to make a strong a priori case that psychoanalytic data are thus contaminated; he has not proved that any particular set of free associations are useless as the basis of a given type of inference.⁵ All scientific data are subject to contamination; that doesn’t make science impossible, only difficult. Scientific methodology is the study of ways to reach useful and asymptotically valid conclusions on the basis of fallible data gathered by fallible human beings.

Many critics of psychoanalysis (Crews and Macmillan are not the only ones) make the understandable error of believing that it is intrinsically impossible to do disciplined, responsible scientific work with free verbal data on aspects of psychoanalytic theory. Having devoted most of my career to learning how to do it and, with the aid of my colleagues at New York University’s Research Center for Mental Health, carrying out a good deal of such research, I can testify that it is not easy, quick, or inexpensive; it is no longer fashionable or easy to fund; and the undertaking cannot be recommended to a young scientist eager to get ahead in an academic career—the payoff in publishable findings is too slow. Hence, the future of psychoanalysis as a science is hardly rosy; but neither is it merely a dream of self-deluded people.

Robert R. Holt

Professor of Psychology Emeritus, NYU

Truro, Massachusetts

To the Editors:

There is one issue that, I believe, is the most substantively central one in evaluating psychoanalytic theory or any other theory that is not adequately addressed in Crews’ original essay, in the letters responding to that essay, or in Crews’ reply to these letters. That issue is the heuristic value of psychoanalytic theory.

In presenting his indictment of psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience, Crews appears to assume that psychoanalytic theory belongs to the psychoanalytic establishment and that its parochial practices are decisive for determining the status of the theory. But psychoanalytic theory belongs to the intellectual and scientific community and, as I will show, has had a significant heuristic impact on that community. He also assumes—and is able to do so because broadsides substitute for careful argumentation—that psychoanalysis is a monolithic entity. It is not. It consists of a somewhat heterogeneous body of propositions, formulations, assumptions and hypotheses, some of which are foundational assumptions, some of which are indeed relatively immune to refutation, and some of which are eminently testable. For example, Freud’s claim that the major part of mental life goes on outside of conscious awareness could be seen as a foundational assumption which, by the way, is shared by most contemporary cognitive scientists. Freud’s ideas about life and death instincts can serve as a good example of a proposition relatively immune to empirical test. And as a final example, some of Freud’s propositions regarding repression and the wish-fulfillment theory of dreams seem eminently testable. (It seems clear that sufficient evidence has accumulated to lead one to conclude that the claim that unconscious wishes represent an invariant component of dreams has been falsified). But in order to make these distinctions, Crews would have to be more knowledgeable about and more interested in the details of psychoanalytic propositions than in other matters with which he is preoccupied.

A critical consideration in assessing the status of any theory is its heuristic value in generating research and further theory-building. This issue, far more important than any of the other matters taken up in his essay, Crews totally ignores. Let me provide merely one example: During the last number of years, an exciting and important body of research on “repressive style” and its correlates has appeared in scientific psychology journals and books.⁶ This work indicates that people who are characterized as employing a repressive style are more likely to show, among other things, higher physiological arousal (including higher blood pressure and cardiac rates) during stress, are more susceptible to certain physical illnesses (e.g., hypertension), and show poorer immune responses. Most important in the present context, this work is clearly and explicitly generated by Freud’s concept of repression. Furthermore, the research thus generated is likely to feed back and further operationalize and modify both the concept of repression and the hypotheses surrounding it. Crews does not appear to be aware of this kind of work. It certainly does not enter into his evaluation of psychoanalytic theory.

There may be and undoubtedly are other aspects of Freudian theory that have not been heuristic and, indeed, may be misleading and harmful. The task, then, for the intellectual and scientific community is to identify and either modify or reject these features of the theory. But such efforts are characterized by careful, discriminating, and detailed appraisals rather than wholesale condemnation or wholesale loyalties.

I would submit that in any serious evaluation of the status of psychoanalytic theory, the kind of heuristic impact I have briefly described is of far greater import and significance than the personal and admittedly juicier tidbits emphasized by Crews.

Morris Eagle, Ph.D.

The Austen Riggs Center

Stockbridge, Massachusetts

To the Editors:

I would like to correct some misconceptions which occur in J. Schimek’s response to Frederick Crews’s article “The Unknown Freud.” Schimek’s findings contained in his 1987 paper “Fact and fantasy in the Seduction Theory” were not “taken out of context and misused” in my book Seductive Mirage; nor did I “conclude from [his] arguments” that Freud made up all the sexual material he got from his patients. I wrote the first draft of my account of the infantile seduction theory episode in 1984; as I state explicitly in my book, the chapter in question was written completely independently of Schimek’s research. Hence I neither misused nor drew any conclusions from his paper, the existence of which I was unaware of until December 1988; the writings from which I drew conclusions were Freud’s own. Schimek is also mistaken in supposing that it was on the basis of the seduction theory episode that I drew the conclusion that Freud made up all the sexual material he got from his patients. (I would prefer to say that, though he certainly resorted to invention on occasion, he inferred most of that material on grossly inadequate grounds and misleadingly presented it as his “findings of analytic research.”) As my book demonstrates, the evidence for the dubious nature of almost all of Freud’s supposed sexual findings can be found throughout his work.