Critiques of psychoanalysis

You are invited to post (links to) critiques of psychoanalysis in this thread. Please always mention the source of any content reproduced here, preferably at the start of your message.

If you want to discuss a specific critique, feel free to create a new thread.


The following are paragraphs taken from M. Boudry's Here be dragons. Exploring the hinterland of science. The complete text with footnotes and references can be found here in PDF format.


10.3 Major defects in Freudian psychoanalysis

10.3.1 The dynamic unconscious

Freudian psychoanalysis consists of both a complex dynamic psychology, a method for investigating the human mind and a framework for interpreting human behavior (in this paper we are not concerned with the effects of psychoanalytic therapy). Psychoanalytic doctrine revolves around the notion of the dynamic unconscious, an imperceptible realm of the human mind full of repressed mental contents, mostly sexual fantasies and desires stemming from early childhood.

The explananda of psychoanalytic interpretations cover a wide range of mental phenomena and their products, including neurotic symptoms, irrational thoughts and behavior, dream contents, slips of the tongue, works of art, social phenomena like religions, etc.71 The structure of a psychoanalytic interpretation typically takes the form “X is/counts as Y”, where the Y-position is occupied by a psychoanalytic concept, and the X-position by an empirical description of observational source material, to which the psychoanalytic concept is assigned. According to the Freudian psychoanalyst, human thoughts and actions display certain anomalies, quirks and inconsistencies which betray the working of unconscious motives and fantasies. These psychological phenomena are supposed to reveal, through a sometimes complex chain of associations, hidden unconscious processes and meanings. Typical instances of psychoanalytic interpretations include: “your compulsive behavior is in fact an enactment of perverse childhood fantasies”, “the stranger in the dream represents your father” or “your emotional insecurity is a manifestation of infantile castration anxiety”.

Although we deliberately restrict our analysis to classical Freudian psychoanalysis, it should be noted that the divergent psychoanalytic schools that followed Freud’s seminal theory have typically retained much of the problematic methodology and epistemology instituted by Freud: the existence of the psychodynamic unconscious, the notion of repression, the method of free association and symbolic interpretation as the gateway to the unconscious, etc. To the extent that these psychoanalytic schools have relied on the same defective aspects of the theory, our arguments apply with equal force (Macmillan 1997; Cioffi 1998).

10.3.2 Antagonistic subsystems

According to Freudian psychoanalysis, the human mind is the playground of a constant struggle between different mental subsystems. On the one hand, Freud often describes these mental systems as possessing intentional content, characterizing them in terms of personal-level concepts borrowed from folk psychology. In his early work, Freud analyzes the purposeful interaction between the unconscious and a mental entity called the censoring mechanism, which attempts to keep repressed mental contents from entering consciousness by means of distortion and disguise. This dynamic framework of antagonistic subsystems was later developed into the tripartite division of Ego, Super-Ego and Id. On the other hand, however, Freud also describes these different mental subsystems and their mutual interactions in purely mechanical terms, for example as being in the business of discharging and distributing a form of mental energy called libido. This tension between personal-level psychology and an impersonal libidinal economy has persisted throughout psychoanalytic literature (Gardner 2000).

Freud developed a complex set of technical concepts to describe dynamical interactions between different mental subsystems. For example, the concept of “negation” describes the transformation of an unconscious wish into a negative form (its denial) upon entering consciousness; “substitution” denotes the replacement of mental content by a substitute through a chain of unconscious association, in which the libido of the first content is transferred to the second, a process of displacement called “cathexis”. “Condensation” denotes the bringing together of libidinal energy in one link connecting two associative chains. “Inversion” and “repression” similarly represent mental mechanisms for transforming mental contents through an invisible libidinal economy.

The vague and open-ended character of these concepts extends the possibility of drawing analytical inferences from observable source material (i.e. the explanandum in a psychoanalytic interpretation) to unconscious mental states and processes almost infinitely. In addition, Freud’s psychology allows a single element in the empirical source material to have multiple unconscious determinants, a phenomenon often referred to as “overdetermination”. These conceptual resources enable the psychoanalyst to make creative use of different sorts of symbolic associations, linguistic connections, double-entendres and homonyms, creating multiple layers of psychoanalytic interpretation. Importantly, what critics perceived as methodological extravagance was for the Freudians themselves inextricably connected with the very nature of the object of inquiry: we are dealing with a dynamic and intentional unconscious after all, which is in constant struggle with the mechanism of censorship, and which seeks ingenious and deceitful ways to provide an outlet for amassed libidinal energy.

Consider, for example, Freud’s use of the concept of “inversion”. Frank Cioffi convincingly argued that, although Freud theorized that neurosis develops when perverse desires remain unsatisfied, he did not recognize that patients who overtly indulged in their perverse desires but were neurotic nonetheless, constituted a refutation of his theory (Cioffi 1998, pp. 119-121). In the case of patients who suffered from neurosis without displaying overtly perverse behavior, Freud explained the symptoms as an outlet for libidinal energy amassed in response to repressed perversities. In the case of overtly perverse neurotic patients, Freud maintained that the symptoms expressed a repressed aversion against their indulging in perversities, and constituted a case of “inversion”.

Another example of typical psychoanalytic reasoning is the way apparent falsifications of the Oedipus complex were handled. For Freud, the affectionate behaviour of little boys towards their mother was a manifestation of incestuous desire. On the other hand, if a boy showed affection towards the father and was cold or hostile towards the mother, as in the famous case of Little Hans, Freud explained the behavior as a reaction formation against the actual incestuous desires, which he thought were partially repressed (Freud 1955a; Van Rillaer 1980, pp. 141-155). Thus, the concepts of inversion and reaction formation allowed Freud to account for virtually every observation.

10.3.3 Conspiracy thinking

The Freudian unconscious is an entity that actively resists interpretation, and that will always try to deceive us in unexpected and cunning ways (Gellner 1985).72 Thus, when Freud was unable to find traces of a pathological complex or unconscious desire to account for a patient’s behavior, he was undeterred and treated this as a token of unconscious resistance. The more the material offered by a patient resisted interpretation, the more it counted in favour of the theory. This characteristic pattern of reasoning in psychoanalysis bears a striking resemblance to conspiracy theorizing (Farrell 1996). For example, consistent with his account of the unconscious, Freud believed that his patients (and his critics) harbored a secret and unconscious wish to see his theories and interpretations proven wrong, and so never to see their own unconscious desires exposed. For instance, one of Freud’s patients dreamt that she had to spend her holidays with her despised mother-in-law. This seemed to belie Freud’s claim that every dream is an unconscious wish-fulfillment, but within the framework of psychoanalytic thinking it could be turned into a confirmation of the theory. As Freud himself explained,

The dream showed that I was wrong. Thus it was her wish that I might be wrong, and her dream showed that wish fulfilled. [italics in original] (Freud 1953a, p. 151)

Freud argued that “these dreams appear regularly in the course of my treatments when a patient is in a state of resistance to me” and he predicted that the same would happen to his readers (Freud 1953a, pp. 157-158).73 Indeed, Freud and his followers became infamous for explaining away criticism from their opponents as tokens of unconscious resistance to the theory, thus further attesting to the truth of psychoanalysis:

They [the critics] are therefore bound to call up the same resistance in him as in our patients; and that resistance finds it easy to disguise itself as an intellectual rejection and to bring up arguments like those which we ward off in our patients by means of the fundamental rule of psycho-analysis. (Freud 1957, p. 39)

As we argued in Chapter 5 and in section 6.4.3, such moves are not merely immunizing gambits which can be neatly disentangled from the theory, but are instead perfectly legitimate, explanatory moves within the psychoanalytic framework, and instantly recognizable as genuine psychoanalytic interpretations (Boudry and Braeckman 2010). This pattern of reasoning, which bears a striking resemblance to conspiracy thinking, is pervasive throughout psychoanalytic literature, and it follows directly from the characterization of the unconscious as an intentional and deceitful mental entity.

10.3.4 The quantitative factor

Freud treated a patient’s explicit denial of his hypotheses – for example in his use of the concept of penis envy – as yet further confirmation of his claims, but that didn’t mean that he was prepared to accept cases where patients readily accepted his interpretations as refuting his theory. Indeed, if the patient‖s dreams seemed to confirm Freud’s notions, they could be explained as an example of “compliance towards the analyst”, and thus again be relegated to unconscious motives (Freud 1961, p. 117) Thus, neither the denial or the (belated) acceptance of an interpretation posed a problem from the perspective of Freudian theory.

The difference between both forms of behavior could be explained by the analyst as the result of unobservable variations in the strength of unconscious resistance on the one hand and the intensity of libidinal energy on the other hand. This “quantitative factor” in the patient’s mental economy had the effect of forestalling the falsification of what initially looked like testable predictions. As Freud himself made clear in a remarkably candid passage, it could always be invoked post factum to account for the unexpected presence or absence of any given symptom:

We cannot measure the amount of libido essential to produce pathological effects. We can only postulate it after the effects of the illness have manifested themselves. (Freud 1924, p. 119)

10.3.5 Conceptual double lives

Another important feature of Freudian psychoanalysis, which further contributes to its epistemic predicament, is that its concepts lead what may be called a “double life” (Cioffi 1998, p. 118): sometimes they seem to be semantically-rich and clearly delineated, but on other occasions they are inflated so as to become almost indefinite and meaningless. This conceptual double life makes central psychoanalytic concepts virtually immune to refutation. Cioffi (1998, p. 15) mentions Freud’s “disingenuous alternation” in the scope of the libido-concept, in which he switches between an explicitly sexual libido on the one hand and a general kind of love and affection on the other hand.74

As pointed out earlier, many concepts in Freudian psychoanalysis (e.g. repression, projection, wish-fulfillment) alternate between personal-level psychology and blind libidinal economy, a form of equivocation that makes psychoanalytic interpretations particularly ambiguous and elusive (Gardner 2000). Esterson (1993, p. 230) has concluded that the functions of the central concepts in Freud’s ego-psychology (Ich, Über-Ich, Es) “are so imprecisely delineated that they can be employed in almost arbitrary fashion to provide support for virtually any theoretical formulation.” Elsewhere (Buekens and Boudry 2010) we have argued that the extension of many psychoanalytic terms is not fixed until applied in interpretations, which goes some way to explaining their open and indeterminate meaning (Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani 2006).

10.3.6 Inseparability of theory, methodology and practice

A number of critics of psychoanalysis (Grünbaum 1984, 2008; Eagle 1988; 1996, 2002) have insisted on a clear distinction between the theory-as-such and the tendency of its advocates to use immunizing gambits and other methodological tricks in the face of falsifying material. These authors maintain that the theoretical problems we reviewed above have nothing to do with psychoanalysis properly speaking, but should be laid at the door of individual analysts.

In this paper, however, we follow critics like Cioffi (1998), Crews (1986) and Macmillan (1997), who have meticulously demonstrated that, in practice, it is all but impossible to indicate a point where the orthodox version of the theory ends and where immunizing strategies and methodological obfuscations begin (Boudry and Braeckman 2010). This is because what Grünbaum and Erwin designate as “dubious” methodological practices and immunizing tactic emerge directly from theory-internal epistemic properties. As Cioffi wrote:

(W)e have no canonical statement of the theory: no agreement on what constitutes modifications of the theory rather than post hoc elucidations of it. […] What we have in Freudian theory is a combination of epistemically ambiguous utterances with methodologically suspect practices. (Cioffi 1998, p. 300)

The way in which the concept of resistance has been put to use by Freud and his acolytes, for example, has been rightly dismissed by critics as a specimen of heads-I-win-tails-you-lose reasoning. Nevertheless, it proves difficult to disentangle such fallacious reasoning from psychoanalytic theory itself, because it is effectively supported by the way the unconscious is conceptualized in Freudian theory. If Freud’s model of the human mind is correct, and if the unconscious really is some sort of trickster in disguise, then indeed it becomes natural to label counter-arguments and criticisms as manifestations of unconscious resistance to psychoanalytic ― ‘truths’ and ― ‘interpretations’.

10.3.7 A cumulative effect

The remarkably versatile and multi-directional methodology of Freudian psychoanalysis (Timpanaro 1976; Macmillan 1997; Cioffi 1998), which has long been noted by its critics, is the natural outcome of dividing the mind into intentional and antagonistic substructures. As we have seen, Freud’s particular dynamic conception of the human mind creates an abundance of inferential possibilities when applied in hermeneutical practice, enabling the analyst to turn any psychological phenomenon into the symptomatic outcome of a hidden psychodynamic conflict. In addition, the conceptual equivocations in the theory render Freud’s hermeneutic machinery even more versatile.75 As Frederick Crews wrote:

Each posited subset of ― the ‘unconscious’ permits another strand of contrary motivation to be added to the already tangled explanatory skein, leaving us, if we are sufficiently gullible, so impressed by the psychoanalytic interpreter’s diagnostic acumen that we think we are witnessing elegant and validated feats of deduction instead of being told a self-serving detective story in which the mystery itself [...] is an artefact of question-begging manoeuvres. (Crews 2006, p. 56)

The cumulative effect of these methodological and conceptual problems is that, if the psychoanalytic unconscious exists, it is deprived of any capacity to put epistemic constraints on theoretical claims and psychoanalytic interpretations. Indeed, any guarantee for interpretive congruency in Freudian psychoanalysis is frustrated by the methodological flexibility and conceptual deficiencies inherent within the theory (Van Rillaer 1980, pp. 87-92; Esterson 1993, p. 242; Macmillan 1997). This was the verdict reached by Malcolm Macmillan in his Freud Evaluated:

[T]he so-called discoveries are dependent upon methods of enquiry and interpretation so defective that even practitioners trained in their use are unable to reach vaguely congruent conclusions about such things as the interpretation of a dream or symptom [...] (Macmillan 1997, p. 516)

Indeed, the internal feuds and factions characterizing post-Freudian psychoanalysis bear witness to the epistemological problems described by critics as Macmillan and Cioffi (Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani 2006, 2008). Already in 1962, the psychoanalyst Judd Marmor observed (with understandable disquietude) that, by means of the psychoanalytic method, confirmations could be found as easily for Freud’s Oedipus complex, as for Adler’s inferiority complex, or for Lacan’s symbolic Father, or for Jung’s anima and persona:

[D]ependent on the view of the analysts the patients of each school generate precisely those data that support the theories and interpretations of their analysts. (Marmor 1962, p. 289)

Returning to the main issue, we will now show that these findings resonate with the SC [social constructivism, Ed.] tenet that “what is believed to be” (Collins 1981a, p. 54) is in no way constrained by “nature” (in this case, what is going on in our minds).

Well, that's an exhaustive bibliography.