Freud Under Analysis
Fifty years after his death, the creator of psychoanalysis is still the subject of intense debate. Was Freud right or wrong? NOVA profiles the enigmatic man and his controversial legacy.
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00:00Tonight, on NOVA, Sigmund Freud revolutionized our thinking about the human mind. But who
00:10was this man, and how do his theories hold up today?
00:14Freud really believed that he had come upon certain insights about the way the mind works
00:19that he regarded as remarkable and quite original. Mind you, he did have insights, but if you
00:26ask in strict scientific terms, I'd be very surprised if much of it survived.
00:31Tonight on NOVA, Freud under analysis.
00:40Major funding for NOVA is provided by this station and other public television stations
00:44nationwide. Additional funding was provided by the Johnson & Johnson family of companies,
00:51supplying health care products worldwide. And by Allied Signal, a technology leader
00:59in aerospace, electronics, automotive products, and engineered materials.
01:21Sigmund Freud is heralded as one of the great thinkers of the 20th century, famous for his
01:32ideas on dreams, childhood sexuality, and the role of the unconscious. Freud saw himself
01:39as a scientist who had discovered a method of understanding the mysteries of the mind,
01:44which he called psychoanalysis. But how scientific is psychoanalysis? And how well do Freud's
01:52ideas stand up to our modern understanding of the mind? Freud revolutionized the way
01:57we think about ourselves, but today there is a widening gap between the popular and
02:02the scientific views of Freud. We live clearly in a Freudian world, and it is quite unthinkable
02:09to envision the world without his language, without his ideas, however well or ill they are expressed.
02:17There's no doubt that his ideas appealed to the imagination of the time, partly because they are
02:22revolutionary, and partly because they seem to fit into the general way of thinking. And so they had
02:28a very large cultural impact, and yet the probability is they won't be correct. The Freudian
02:35revolution began here in Vienna. These films, taken in the late 1920s, show Freud's followers.
02:42They came from all over the world to the city that was known as the center of psychoanalysis.
02:48Some were physicians like Freud, others were intellectuals drawn to Vienna by the excitement
02:53of being part of a new movement. But most came to learn Freud's radical new form of treatment.
02:58They entered his famous consulting rooms at Berggasse 19
03:04in the hopes of undergoing a training analysis with the master himself.
03:17When these films were taken, Freud was in his 70s.
03:21His daughter Anna, herself an analyst, was a constant companion.
03:25Psychoanalysis was Freud's passion. During the day, he saw patients. At night, he spent hours
03:31reading or writing. He was tireless in his devotion to what he called his new science.
03:38His ideas were so powerful, so potent, that they have dramatically influenced almost every discipline,
03:45including literature, art, and medicine. But the Freudian legacy is a complicated one.
03:52Although he wanted psychoanalysis to stand on its own as a science, it is known today mainly
03:59as a form of therapy. As a young doctor in the 1930s, Joseph Wirtjes traveled to Vienna to
04:06undergo a training analysis with Freud. Now a psychiatrist at the State University of New York,
04:12Dr. Wirtjes describes his first session. I was rather surprised at his physical appearance.
04:18He was then well into his 70s, and he was looking extremely small and frail, and at the same time
04:28quite energetic. He spoke in a vigorous sort of professorial style, clipping his syllables,
04:38and he was direct and to the point. He said he would be glad to take me on. He stated his fee,
04:48which would be the equivalent of $20 an hour, which seems very little nowadays, but in those days
04:56in Vienna, it was a substantial fee. And he said my responsibilities would be simply to
05:04expose my thoughts, my feelings, to be candid, to discuss my dreams. And he did not set a specific
05:16goal. I think his assumption was that in time, material would turn up, which he would interpret,
05:22or as he would say, bring to consciousness. And that's how the analytic process would be.
05:30That's how the analytic process would unfold. I would come in and say, Herr Professor, I had some
05:40really good dreams last night, and he would say, fine, let's talk about them. And he would approach
05:49them with a real interest and zest. And if I was able to pitch in with some interpretations that he
05:57This was a very good session. On the other hand, if I was skeptical and resistant,
06:04he would show his disappointment and sometimes his irritation in no uncertain way. And he would
06:13say, you have no right to be skeptical. He said, first you should learn about the analysis.
06:18When the Freud Museum opened in London in the summer of 1986, many of Freud's followers, those
06:25who did learn about the analysis, gathered to pay tribute. Among them was an historian from
06:32Yale University, Professor Peter Gay, the author of a new biography of Freud. The museum is in the
06:38house where Freud lived the last year of his life after having fled Vienna during the Nazi occupation.
06:45He brought with him many of his prized possessions, his writing desk, his collection
06:50of antiquities, and the famous couch. Professor Peter Gay. As you look around his study and
06:58above all in his consulting room, you can see he had really two passions, and they blend into one.
07:04One was psychology. He said, I have a tyrant, psychology, and he welcomed that tyrant. And the
07:09other was, of course, collecting antiquities, which he collected avidly as soon as he could
07:15afford them, which was from the late 1880s on. Freud said, these are characteristic of what I do.
07:23I, too, am an archaeologist. I like to dig, and what I dig at, of course, and dig into is the
07:28human mind. And that metaphor of digging as an archaeologist, whether it is finding those
07:35treasures or digging into ancient Rome, as he says in one of his books, does bring this together.
07:42And his own sense was that this collecting took him back to a kind of childhood of humanity, as he
07:49once said. And this is, of course, very close to the work that he was doing
07:53when he sat in his chair analysing patients, going back to their childhood as well.
08:02Vienna at the turn of the century was a city of contradictions.
08:06It was dominated by the Victorian ethic of strict morality.
08:10At the same time, it was also a city excited by new ideas coming from a vibrant artistic
08:16and intellectual community. But Freud's Vienna was a world of science and medicine.
08:27His friends were doctors. His education, his medical education, was crucial for him,
08:32much more important, I think, than it might be for any ordinary physician, because he absorbed with
08:38it not merely medical knowledge, of which he had a great deal and which he used as a psychologist
08:44rather than as a doctor, but also a philosophy, a view of the world, a completely secular,
08:51materialistic view into which he fitted his psychology. Freud distinguished himself academically
08:58at a very young age. He was a prolific writer and an avid reader in the arts, humanities, and
09:03sciences. He attended the University of Vienna to study medicine, one of the few professions with
09:09opportunities for a young Jewish man. Freud was schooled in the scientific methods of the 19th
09:16century laboratory, which stressed the importance of experimentation, observation, and measurement.
09:22He became an expert in neurology. These drawings illustrate his interest in the brain and nervous
09:29system. His experiments with nerve cells led him to invent a new method of dyeing tissue samples
09:35for study. Freud also experimented with cocaine. He used it himself for at least 10 years.
09:43He was enthusiastic about its therapeutic properties and speculated on its potential
09:47as an anesthetic for the eye, publishing several papers, including On Cocaine. During these years,
09:55he was greatly influenced by his university professors, especially Ernst von Brücke,
10:00an adherent of the Helmholtz School of Thought, scientists who believed that everything was
10:05reducible to chemical and physical forces. In the scientific mind of the 19th century,
10:12all phenomena could be logically understood.
10:17But Freud, now 30 years old and engaged to be married, was warned by his teachers that he would
10:22never make enough money as a researcher. They encouraged him to work with patients and open a
10:28private practice. For several years, Freud worked in psychiatric hospitals and clinics. As his
10:35practice grew, he became interested in hysteria, a nervous disorder in which patients experience
10:40physical symptoms but have no underlying physical disease. He began using a new, controversial
10:46technique, hypnosis. Discouraged with the results, however, he turned to his colleague and close friend
10:54Josef Breuer for advice. As Freud later described, it was from these conversations that psychoanalysis
11:01began to take form. For some time, when he was asked who was the founder of psychoanalysis,
11:07he would not say, I am the founder, but rather he would use his friend and collaborator, a somewhat
11:14older Viennese physician, Josef Breuer, because Breuer had told him the story of one of his,
11:20of Breuer's patients. The story is of a young, intelligent, well-educated woman who develops
11:27all kinds of bizarre psychological symptoms. She forgets her German, for example. She
11:31finds herself unable to drink water out of a glass. She has long lapses of attention,
11:38which appear to be hysterical in some sense. And, of course, that is how later it will be called,
11:43a very complicated case of hysteria. Now, Breuer, more or less by accident, comes upon
11:50the way of dealing with and disposing of these symptoms. He does so by asking her, or she in a
11:55way suggests this to him, and her share in the cure is very important, that that should all be
12:01talked out, so that whenever a symptom is mentioned that she should see if she could remember what
12:07this reminded her of. This becomes then the famous talking cure. At first, Freud talked to his
12:12patients while they were in a hypnotic state. He believed hysterical symptoms were related to
12:18painful events from childhood. He thought that if his patients could remember and talk about the
12:23first time they experienced their symptoms, they would be relieved of their suffering.
12:28Gradually, he abandoned the use of hypnosis. In one of his most well-known cases,
12:33Fraulein Elisabeth von Aar, Freud wrote about the method he used to help patients recall their
12:38earliest memories. I made her lie down and keep her eyes shut. Throughout the analysis, I made
12:47use of the technique of bringing out pictures and the ideas by means of pressing on the patient's
12:52head. When I pressed her head, she would maintain that nothing occurred to her. I would repeat my
12:58pressure, but still nothing appeared. Perhaps I said she had not been sufficiently attentive,
13:04or perhaps her idea was not the right one. This, I told her, was not her affair. She was under an
13:10obligation to remain completely objective and say whatever came into her head, whether it was
13:16appropriate or not. Freud began working with a technique he called free association, encouraging
13:24his patients to talk freely without interruption or suggestion. Freud was a famous observer and
13:30a fine listener. Listening became for him the crucial art. It was not just something passive
13:35like not talking. It was the kind of not talking that was in some very important way productive,
13:41and it meant the storing up in the mind of relevant material that could then be used later
13:45and brought to bear when the time was right. This was a matter of tact. So there's a good
13:50deal of art to psychoanalysis as he saw it, but above all, beyond the art, he always himself
13:56certainly believed, and I'm willing, by the way, to go along with him on this, that he was really
14:00a scientist, and a scientist of the mind, and he was working towards and understanding how people
14:05work, not just how his patients work. In 1895, Breuer and Freud published their findings in
14:12Studies on Hysteria. Freud detailed the case histories of six patients and outlined for the
14:18first time the techniques that would become the foundation of psychoanalysis. These included
14:25free association and transference, the process in which a patient transfers feelings from previous
14:32relationships onto the relationship with the analyst. But within a year, Freud announced
14:37another major discovery, his seduction theory. He claimed that hysteria was caused by sexual
14:43abuses or seductions that took place in childhood. He based this new theory on the testimony of his
14:48patients. Freud was essentially treating his patients trying to do two things which were
14:54separate, but he hoped not incompatible. On the one hand, he was trying to cure or at least
15:01reduce the strain of the neurotic problems with which they had come. It is simply,
15:06in that sense, the therapy like others, but he thought better than others. And secondly, he was
15:10using his patients as guinea pigs, that is to say, they were part of the laboratory, I think,
15:16of his consulting room as his one and only laboratory. The seduction theory was not well
15:22received by Freud's medical and academic colleagues. They rejected his conclusions.
15:28Even Breuer broke with him. Freud retreated into a period of intellectual isolation.
15:34During that time, he shared his ideas mainly with one person, a friend and colleague,
15:39Wilhelm Fliess. Fliess was a physician in Berlin. During the 15-year period of their friendship,
15:46they corresponded almost weekly, sharing personal and professional ambitions.
15:52Freud confided to Fliess that he had a grand vision to create a universal theory of the
15:57mind from his understanding of abnormal behavior. He wrote to Fliess his project
16:02for a scientific psychology. Frank Sullaway is a historian of science at Harvard University.
16:10He believes that the project shows how important Freud's scientific aspirations were
16:15in formulating his theories. The project was Freud's tremendously ambitious attempt to reduce
16:25the workings of the mind to basic notions of natural science. And in Freud's day,
16:32this included a reliance upon the neuron theory, which was just then emerging, and the notion that
16:40you could explain mental activity by explanations involving movements of energy between neurons
16:46within the brain, or between various cellular elements. And Freud concocted, and I think you
16:51have to use the word concocted, the most incredibly ingenious and imaginative scheme for
16:58explaining virtually every kind of mental activity, from thought to judgment to problems dear to his
17:05heart in psychopathology, such as repression and various forms of neurosis, hysterical attacks.
17:12Freud soon abandoned the project, but the movement of energy through the body and the mind,
17:17especially sexual energy, remained a key Freudian motif. It's very important to appreciate why Freud
17:25was so fanatical about sex as a cause of neurosis. Why did he pick sex? He could have picked lots of
17:30things. It's not just the repression that, let's say, sex was undergoing in the Victorian period.
17:39Sex was much more important to Freud. Sex was a biochemical phenomenon. It was a physiological
17:44phenomenon. And for somebody who's looking for a theory of the mind that can be based upon a
17:50natural science foundation, sex is crucial. It provides what Freud once called the
17:56indispensable organic foundation which must underlie all forms of disease. So for Freud, sex
18:03was a plausible natural science form of pathology, and it takes on its importance in Freudian theory
18:11precisely because of that link to biology and to natural science. The Freud-Fleece correspondence
18:18indicates that sexuality did become the central concept in Freud's thinking, but one critic,
18:24Geoffrey Mason, who translated the letters, believes they also reveal Freud's willingness to
18:29explore with Fleece some extreme sexual notions. What so fascinated me in reading the letters was
18:36the degree of Freud's involvement with Fleece. In the beginning, they seemed to have found one
18:42another in this vast scientific desert, two men who could think the same way, could think alike.
18:48And Fleece developed a series of rather strange, even bizarre notions about the relationship
18:56between the female genitalia and the nose, what he called the nasal reflex neurosis.
19:01Namely, the things that happened in the genitals were reflected in the nose, and he felt that he
19:07sometimes had to intervene with surgery. And Freud, for a very long period, believed in this, accepted
19:14Fleece's ideas, and felt, in fact, that they were really in harmony with his own. Now, I think, in
19:21retrospect, we would say that they were not in harmony, and Freud, no doubt, some years later,
19:26would have recognized this himself. But for a period of time, Fleece was enormously influential.
19:33Freudian scholars are aware of the controversial aspects of Freud's relationship to Fleece,
19:38but most analysts, like Dr. Harold Blum, value the letters as an important record of the evolution of
19:45Freud's major ideas. The Freud-Fleece letters are now part of a large collection at the Library of
19:51Congress in Washington, D.C. The Freud-Fleece correspondence is of extraordinary importance
19:57as a record of the first self-analysis ever accomplished. Freud's self-analysis was a
20:04systematic self-exploration begun in October 1896, after the death of his father, and he proceeded to
20:13accomplish what no one had ever done before, to analyze himself so that he was both
20:17doctor and patient, although Fleece served as a confidant and as a kind of proto-analyst,
20:23and Freud was reporting the results of his analytic discoveries to Fleece in these very
20:28letters. At that period, dreams provided the greatest insights for him, and he proceeded
20:36in a very systematic way to regularly analyze himself on a daily basis, making a record,
20:43writing down his dreams, and proceeding to analyze them. By writing down his dreams and
20:48free associating, Freud recalled events from his youth. He related in a letter to Fleece the
20:54important details of his self-analysis. He had discovered intense feelings of love for his mother,
21:00jealousy and hatred for his father, what he will later call the Oedipus complex.
21:06Freud believed that dreams provided access to a deeper understanding of behavior.
21:13I found the dream represented a particular state of affairs as I should have wished it to be.
21:20Thus the content of a dream was the fulfillment of a wish, and its motive was a wish.
21:27If we adopt the method of interpreting dreams, we shall find that dreams really have a meaning.
21:32Freud concluded that dreams revealed sexual and aggressive wishes from childhood.
21:38He published this radical new vision in 1900 in Interpretation of Dreams, what he called his most
21:46original work. He felt he had come upon a universal truth, the idea of infantile sexuality,
21:54infantile sexuality, that everyone was sexual from birth.
22:00He decided to ask the patients to do with dreams what he had asked them to do in connection with
22:08their symptoms, namely to discuss each element or to see what came to their mind if they permitted
22:16themselves to speak freely and without criticism of their thoughts. In this way he began to see
22:23that dreams expressed a wish from childhood, usually a sexual wish, but did not express it
22:32directly, but in a disguised and distorted way. When he described some of his interpretations
22:40of dreams to his good friend and colleague Wilhelm Fleiss, Fleiss said to him that the
22:46interpretation sounded like jokes and bad ones at that. Far from being offended, what Freud did was
22:52to take the idea seriously and to investigate what was it that brought the pleasure from jokes.
23:01Freud wanted to demonstrate that psychoanalysis had applications beyond its use as a treatment
23:06for neuroses, that it was the key to the workings of the mind. In rapid succession, Freud published
23:13Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious and Psychopathology of Everyday Life, in which
23:19he described how slips of the tongue or forgetfulness revealed conflicts about hidden
23:24thoughts or feelings. Freud now saw the mind divided into three areas, the unconscious,
23:32the place of sexual and aggressive wishes, urges, memories, and fantasies, the pre-conscious,
23:40a gatekeeper that permitted or prevented wishes from entering consciousness,
23:44and the conscious mind, the seat of awareness. Freud believed that when unconscious wishes were
23:52in conflict, or when blocked by the pre-conscious, they came out anyway as slips of the tongue,
23:58dreams, or as neurotic symptoms. I think Freud really believed that he had come upon
24:06certain insights about the nature of the mind, the way the mind works,
24:10that he regarded as remarkable and quite original, although he was very well aware that there were
24:15other psychologists, philosophers, poets, novelists, who had come upon ideas that he
24:22himself had, as he said, laboriously had to find through his own laboratory, the patients on the
24:27couch. Freud considered dreams, infantile sexuality, and the unconscious to be his great ideas.
24:35He said, the poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious, but I have discovered
24:41the scientific means by which it can be studied. But most of the scientific community in Vienna
24:47found his ideas to be peculiar and extreme. Freud's notion of the unconscious is a very
24:54uniquely Freudian one. It supposes that there's actually a sort of an area of the mind that gets
24:59sealed off in the course of human development, within which tempestuous instincts are struggling
25:07for release, but can't find proper release owing to this phenomenon of having been sealed off.
25:12And that's the unconscious mind. It's a very animal-like unconscious. It has all of these
25:20wild and tempestuous instincts inside of it. And when we speak of an unconscious behavior,
25:26that's a different sense of the word than Freud thought. Freud's was a very dynamic unconscious,
25:30and it's one that is much more plausible in the context of biological notions of his day, that
25:36that unconscious was our animal evolutionary past for Freud. And in that animal evolutionary past
25:42are things that are incompatible with modern civilization, but there's no way to escape it
25:46because we are forced to inherit all these things from the past and to repeat them. So Freud's
25:51unconscious is alive, powerful, sealed off, and dangerous, and it's part of a 19th century thinking
25:59about the organism and evolution. In 1905, Freud published three essays on the theory of sexuality,
26:08linking what he had named the psychosexual stages of development, oral, anal, phallic, and genital,
26:14to personality traits. The public was outraged by his use of sexual language in reference to children.
26:22Privately, Freud admitted to Fleece that his new ideas on sexuality had serious implications for
26:27his original seduction theory about the cause of hysteria. He wrote to Fleece that he had been
26:33mistaken. He now believed that what his patients had described as sexual abuse was really fantasy,
26:39the result of childhood wishes. This change in Freud's thinking has become one of the hot spots
26:45in Freudian scholarship. In 1984, Jeffrey Mason published this book. He charged that Freud abandoned
26:52his seduction theory not because of new evidence provided by his work with patients, but because of
26:58other pressures. What became clear to me as I was reading these letters was that there were pressures
27:04on Freud that were of a non-scientific nature. For example, the response from his medical and
27:12scientific colleagues was a very negative one. They refused to believe with Freud that these
27:17events could possibly take place. And he was quite sensitive to this. Remember, he was a young
27:22physician. He was just beginning his medical and psychiatric practice. It was important for him,
27:28in order to have referrals and to have the kind of respect to become a member of the scientific
27:33community and of the university scientific community, to persuade his colleagues that
27:37he had something new to offer. And they were rejecting his ideas about seduction.
27:42The abandonment of the seduction theory, like every other change that Freud made,
27:46was based on the analysis of his findings. He was constantly re-examining his material
27:56and his ideas and correlating theory and findings. This, of course, is the method of science.
28:05At first, in the situation and at the time that he was working, he believed the stories
28:14that his patients told him of their having been seduced by some older person who had already
28:22matured sexually, and that these were the basis of the traumatic memories that caused hysteria.
28:30It was natural for Freud to take these stories at face value, because at that particular time,
28:39it was believed that the sexual life of the individual began with puberty. Nonetheless,
28:45Freud's patients were telling him that they had sexual fantasies, sexual wishes during childhood.
28:52However, could he explain this except with the idea that something must have happened
28:59to stimulate these individuals, these patients, prematurely into sexuality? That is the result
29:07of some kind of seduction. Why really should we care about something that seems like a rather
29:14remote historical question? Well, I think the answer is because analysts from the time of Freud
29:20on were convinced that Freud gave up the seduction hypothesis for purely scientific reasons. Once
29:28they believed this, his ideas became really doctrine within psychoanalysis and then spread
29:36to psychology and to psychiatry in general, so that his views about reality versus fantasy came
29:42to play an enormous role in our society. They have been taken over from psychiatry and psychology,
29:50more or less into the general population, so that we see this even in the judicial system
29:55when a woman is talking about rape or when a child is talking about having been abused.
30:01The first tendency is to believe that this may be nothing more than a fantasy, and ultimately
30:07that derives from Freud. Many of the controversies surrounding Freud have centered on the question
30:16of whether psychoanalysis is a science. Freud himself thought it had broader applications.
30:23In the years following his major publications on childhood sexuality, Freud applied psychoanalytic
30:29principles to religion, history, literature, and anthropology. He also had created a new model of
30:36the mind, the id, ego, and superego. These three forces represented the interplay of passion,
30:43rationality, and moral judgment. His ideas were so powerful that many intellectuals were
30:50drawn to psychoanalysis as a way to understand larger social and philosophical questions,
30:55war and peace, love and hate, religion and morality.
31:04Freud often spent his summers in the country outside of Vienna.
31:07He found comfort in spending time with his wife, their six children, and a loyal group of friends,
31:14including Princess Marie Bonaparte of Greece, whom Freud had analyzed. Initially, a small group of
31:22adventurous followers gathered around him, some famous, some not, but they attracted attention
31:27to Freud and the new field of psychoanalysis. Freud was for, let's say, the first time in his
31:35Freud was for, let's say, the first ten years of psychoanalytic practice, let us say, from the
31:40middle 1890s to 1905, 1906, anything but famous. He may have exaggerated a little bit how isolated
31:48he was. He had admirers by 1906, 1907. There were, in fact, even some rather distinguished
31:54professional admirers. By 1911, an international association of analysts had grown up around Freud.
32:02Psychoanalysis was largely rejected by the traditional scientific community.
32:06These early analysts saw themselves at the forefront of a new intellectual movement,
32:11and they banded together against a hostile outside world.
32:16But there was also dissent within the group. Carl Jung, one of Freud's most ardent admirers,
32:22claimed that Freud had overemphasized the importance of childhood sexuality.
32:27And later Karen Horney, another analyst, would charge that Freud had grossly misunderstood
32:33female psychology, a charge that was echoed throughout the coming years.
32:39World War I became a turning point in the history of psychoanalysis.
32:43Overnight it gained wider credibility. Techniques derived from psychoanalysis
32:48were thought to be useful in treating soldiers who had been shell-shocked in battle.
32:52After World War I, European interest in Freudian methods grew. In Berlin,
32:58the first training institute was opened. In Vienna, a psychoanalytic clinic was
33:05started by members of the Vienna Society. These institutes were essential to the growth
33:14of psychoanalysis, but Frank Soloway contends there was a price to be paid.
33:18Freud and his followers took a very crucial step in the 1920s, approximately, when they decided to
33:31have their own institutes for training, and given hostility to psychoanalysis within the universities,
33:37to establish their own centers of learning and of training outside of universities.
33:42This essentially removed psychoanalysis from a two-thirds of the world.
33:46This essentially removed psychoanalysis from a 2,000-year tradition of criticism and growth of
33:52knowledge, and I think for Freud it was a short-term gain. Psychoanalysis proliferated
33:56with its own teaching mechanisms, but it was a long-term disaster, I think.
34:02The 1920s were an exciting time for psychoanalysis. Many analysts, like Franz
34:07Alexander of the Berlin Institute, would eventually leave Europe and spread psychoanalysis to America.
34:13A. A. Brill, an American analyst, had translated most of Freud's work into English.
34:20Ernest Jones, Freud's biographer, would help found the American Psychoanalytic Association.
34:27In Europe, psychoanalysis generally remained outside the medical and academic establishments,
34:32but in America it would be different. The American reception and interpretation of Freud was a very
34:39optimistic reception and interpretation. American analysts often believed that they could cure
34:45the most severe of neuroses, even psychoses, that they could treat, for example, schizophrenics.
34:52This was something that Freud had never felt. There was something about psychoanalysis that
34:58suggested to Americans as representatives of a new nation, of a frontier nation,
35:04a wonderful buoyant optimism about the mind and the kinds of things that doctors could do for the
35:09mind. The press played a role in popularizing psychoanalysis, sometimes in a sensational way.
35:16By the 1930s, most Americans were at least familiar with Freud and his new psychology.
35:25The magazines were interested in this sensational figure. There he was,
35:29this bearded Viennese doctor talking about sex all the time, so it seemed,
35:34encouraging promiscuity. He seemed to be just perfect for the 1920s and the age of Fitzgerald
35:41and so on. That this, of course, had nothing to do with the austerity of this doctrine
35:45was something that didn't bother the weeklies or even the newspapers at all.
35:50Everybody was reading books about psychoanalysis and trying to understand their own problems in
35:56this way by concentrating themselves on psychoanalytic techniques. It was very well
36:03suited to the demands of private practice. Psychiatrists would only need to have a hotel
36:10room to practice in, and there seemed to be an endless demand for services for psychoanalytic
36:17treatment. May I have your last name? During World War II, American army psychiatrists
36:24used a modified form of psychoanalysis in combination with other techniques to treat
36:29soldiers. In the 40s and 50s, there was an increased interest in psychotherapies or
36:34talking therapies, which were based in psychoanalytic theory. Now, I noticed in this
36:39history that you saw a vision of your brother. Tell me something about that. What happened?
36:48Oh, I guess it was a dream. Well, describe the dream. What did you see in the dream?
36:55I dreamt that I was home. My brother was home. After the war, it was considered prestigious
37:02for psychiatrists to enhance their medical education with six to ten years of additional
37:07training at an analytic institute. Can you tell me what brought you here?
37:13This introductory training film was made in 1962 by analysts from the Chicago Institute
37:19to demonstrate the proper methods of working with patients. I don't know whether I need to
37:24be here or not, as a matter of fact. Well, I've had a little trouble with jobs, but
37:33that's about all. Just tell me. Analysts were taught the techniques of free association and
37:40transference. These techniques continued to distinguish psychoanalysis and analytically-based
37:47therapies from the growing number of other talking therapies. Analysts believe, as did Freud,
37:54that an individual develops complex patterns of behavior early in life,
37:58and that these patterns inevitably surface in the analysis through the process of transference.
38:04I get this feeling lately that you're critical of me, that you're, that you're hounding me,
38:10that you're, that you're down on me about something. What did I do that was so bad?
38:24I don't know what brings this on. Over and over the same trouble. Now you.
38:28Now you. I don't know how to handle situations like this. I'm just stumped. I've been thinking
38:37maybe I better clear out. Maybe I ought to, you and I ought to call this thing quits.
38:44Just like the jobs. Just like my old man. I just had to get out of the family and forget about it.
38:51During the 1950s and 60s, psychoanalysis was considered by many to be the preferred
38:56form of treatment for people with emotional problems. But it was expensive and lengthy.
39:02It required four to five sessions a week for at least two years. And even during a period
39:07of relative success, psychoanalysis was under attack. In 1952, an article appeared stating
39:14that the outcome for a patient undergoing analysis was no better than that of someone
39:20who had received no therapy. The article by the British behavioral psychologist Hans Eysenck was
39:26later refuted. But criticism like this challenged psychoanalysis to demonstrate its effectiveness
39:34through controlled scientific studies. For Freud, his patients confirmed his ideas.
39:43They provided him with the material to develop the theory of psychoanalysis.
39:47And what his patients revealed in their sessions proved its validity. Although Freud saw hundreds
39:53of patients, he only wrote extensive case histories on 12 of them. These 12 cases and
39:59the case study method became the foundation of psychoanalytic training. Today, many analysts
40:06still consider the case study method sufficient proof. Freud's standard of proof was the
40:14conclusions that he could draw from the data that he got within the analytic situation while
40:22he was treating patients. This is the investigative tool of psychoanalysis. There is no way of drawing
40:29conclusions about psychoanalytic hypotheses if you leave out the data that you get from the
40:39analytic situation. They're not proving anything by listening to patients confirm their expectations.
40:45This isn't proof for testing in a rigorous way. Psychoanalysis needs to get itself back into
40:52settings where it can be tested in experimental and extraclinical ways. It needs to take a hard
40:58look at areas of the theory that have been problematical and it needs to go on.
41:03And I think the hardest thing is for the analysts themselves to do this. They don't have the kind of
41:08training or background to treat psychoanalysis as the kind of natural science it once was.
41:14I think, in part, the attitude towards experimentation, this negative attitude,
41:20was, if the word fault is correct, Freud's own fault. But one might argue that the continuation
41:25of this attitude, to the extent that it persists, is the responsibility of those who don't cut
41:30themselves loose from Freud simply on the grounds that Freud himself had said this and that's good
41:35enough for them. And we all know that that's not what would be called a scientific attitude, for sure.
41:41Although psychoanalysis was the original form of psychotherapy, it is among the least
41:47practiced today. The American Psychoanalytic Association, with its membership of 2,500,
41:53is small compared to the number of mental health professionals in this country.
41:59There is intense pressure on this community to prove the effectiveness of psychoanalysis.
42:04But providing proof is difficult. The length and private nature of the process do not lend
42:11themselves easily to scientific scrutiny. How, then, should psychoanalysis be assessed today?
42:18There are many differing views, including those held by critics who are themselves analysts.
42:24Dr. Thomas Szasz. Well, what Freud developed, what he contended that he developed, were really two
42:30interlocking systems. One, a theory of human behavior, both normal and abnormal, and a system
42:37of therapy, of treating, relieving mental diseases. Now, he felt that these were mutually confirmatory.
42:49In my view, so-called psychonic theory does not really qualify at all as a scientific theory,
42:55because it is more like a Weltanschauung, an ideology of how human beings should be and should
43:03behave. Now, that is legitimate, but it's not science. An ideology is perhaps the best modern
43:10word for this. It's a secular religion. Now, the therapy, again, unless one believes that there is
43:17an illness which is being treated, is not a therapy, but is a way of helping people.
43:22And the two actually are really quite separate. It is quite possible to accept a great deal,
43:27I think, of the therapeutic ideas and methods and reject virtually all of the theory, which is my
43:35position. The body of scientific evidence to support Freudian theory is so far small and
43:42inconclusive. At the Yale Child Study Center in New Haven, researchers are exploring aspects
43:48of Freudian theory by observing young children. The study focuses on four- to six-year-olds,
43:55the age Freud called the most critical phase of development, the oedipal stage.
44:02These researchers acknowledge the importance of many factors in the growth of the child,
44:07but like Freud, they see sexual conflict as a key factor,
44:11conflict having to do with children's sexual identity and feelings toward their parents.
44:18The sessions are videotaped to be studied later.
44:26He has little pants.
44:30It's actually a girl with a short haircut. Can you put this down? Can you put that on, please?
44:38It's a dress with pants.
44:42Uh-huh. Have you ever seen that in a review? Yes.
44:51The research team studies the tapes, looking for the language patterns, the interactions the child
44:56has with her analyst, and themes in her play. They believe these act as clues to understanding
45:02a child's inner feelings, especially relating to sexual identity. She's working out. Is it a boy?
45:09Is it a girl? And she says at first that it's a boy. She then takes the pants down and says,
45:15no, it's a girl. And she's able to deal with the incongruity by saying, well, it's a girl
45:22with short hair and pants. And I think that, you know, the curiosity and perhaps some of
45:30the conflict that one sees in children at this age is something that she's working on at this
45:36moment in the play. The methods of this study depend on observation and interpretation by the
45:42researchers, most of whom are analysts. The study may be useful in expanding upon Freud's ideas,
45:49but it does not meet the rigorous demands of the scientific method.
45:54Other researchers are conducting controlled experiments, and the evidence provided by
46:00these studies has moved the field of child development beyond Freud. Dr. Jerome Kagan.
46:07Freud was perhaps the boldest theorist we've had in psychology. He
46:16believed strongly that the major determinants of the child's normal growth and pathological growth
46:24could be fixed to certain experiences in the opening years of life. But he ignored
46:30the maturational changes that are occurring in the child's central nervous system
46:35that permit new mental or intellectual abilities, and those in turn permit the child to relate him
46:41or herself to the parents and to the outside world. And that, it seems to me, was the mistake
46:47that he made in the rest of his theorizing by trying to make sexual energy, sexual conflict,
46:54sexual anxiety, the key central primary cause of both normal and pathological development.
47:03Dr. Kagan and his colleagues at Harvard University believe that early experience is important in the
47:10development of the individual, but they also believe that the genetic makeup of the child
47:16can be a contributor to the development of personality traits. The researchers here use
47:23observational methods, along with other experimental techniques, to gather information
47:28about a child's predisposition to certain emotions, like boldness, shyness, and in this case, anxiety.
47:42These tests are designed to meet the criteria of the experimental method.
47:46They have control groups, are repeatable, and provide data from which researchers can predict
47:52behavior. Advances in the field of psychology and biology are now beginning to answer some of the
47:59same questions posed by Freud almost 100 years ago. In England, a Nobel laureate and one of the
48:07scientists who discovered the structure of DNA, Dr. Francis Crick, has turned his attention to
48:13the study of the brain, including memory and dreams. How does he assess Freud? Freud was a very strange
48:21case, because he started off being interested in the physiology of the brain and wanting to try to
48:27relate that physiology to psychology, and he wrote an essay on this, his so-called project. What we
48:34know is that the ideas he had about physiology were really wrong. When you look at the ideas,
48:39they don't seem very plausible, at least not to me, but they seem to be based on an old-fashioned idea
48:46of the mind and so on, which people interested in information processing, as I do, would regard as
48:52rather naive and heavily culturally determined, let's put it that way, which of course was why
48:58they had such a great appeal. Mind you, he did have insights. He did make people realize a lot of their
49:05behavior, the motives for their behavior wasn't what they thought they were. He did make it clear
49:10that people were more influenced by sexual reasons than they, in the 19th century, they were prepared
49:15to admit. Maybe it's different nowadays, and so on, and a lot of other things of that sort. But if you
49:20ask in strict scientific terms, I'd be very surprised if much of it survives. Freud thought
49:26that dreams were wish fulfillment. He thought that was his great idea. But when you read his account
49:33and how he had to twist things to fit the theory, it's very difficult to accept this, and I'm not
49:39sure that all Freudians now accept that key idea of his. And then, of course, he had other
49:47aspects of dreams and so on, which are more complex, and we would feel that's all too
49:52fancy, that it's all too easy to interpret dreams without having any check on what the interpretation
49:59is. So we're inclined to leave all that on one side and say, that's for the future. We understand
50:05so little of the brain at the moment, it's really a waste of time inventing all these things. People
50:10love to do it, but in the past they liked to believe that dreams foretold the future. Very few
50:17people believe that now, but they like to think there's some deep significance in their dreams.
50:22We would think it's just an accidental by-product, produced by somewhat random waves, and so on,
50:28and you shouldn't read too much into it. I agree with many of the most prominent
50:35natural scientists, biologists, and philosophers of science, who have contended that psychoanalysis
50:41is not a science. It has nothing to do with science. It is an ideology. And it is, of course,
50:49significant not for it being a science or for its impact on science, which I think is nil,
50:54but as a cultural phenomenon, as a historical phenomenon. It's obvious that psychoanalysis and
51:00Freud, and here one really should compare him to someone like Marx, or other religious figures,
51:06had a tremendous impact on how we live today. The issue really is one of names here, which I think
51:12is not where we should stay. Is it a science or not? The question really is this. Are the
51:18assertions made by psychoanalysis, either the global ones, such as the development of a child
51:23through various stages, or the narrow ones, namely the interpretations that an analyst makes during
51:30the hour, are they in any sense reliable? Or are they just ad hoc assertions that you could
51:35read about in a novel and agree because they're well stated, or disagree because they're not well
51:40stated? And I would think that what would have to suggest is that the kind of organized discipline,
51:46or science, that psychoanalysis claims to be, and I think with justice, is one in which
51:53proof and disproof are extremely difficult, given the nature of the material, but that any
51:58other psychology dealing with fundamental human mental realities faces the same problem.
52:06In 1936, Freud celebrated his golden wedding anniversary with his wife, Martha.
52:16They were surrounded by friends and a family that now included many grandchildren.
52:22But this was one of the last celebrations Freud was to hold near his home in Vienna.
52:28In 1938, when the Nazis invaded Austria, he fled to England.
52:35In London, Freud was a celebrity. He was honored by the Royal Society.
52:42They asked him to sign the official charter book in which his name would appear with the
52:46signatures of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. He was considered for a Nobel Prize several times,
52:54but was never chosen. The award he valued most was the Goethe Prize,
53:00given not for his scientific contribution, but for his literary achievements.
53:06Freud had become the most famous psychologist in the world,
53:09but he never achieved the full acceptance of the scientific community.
53:13These films are among the last taken of Freud. This was the occasion of his 83rd birthday.
53:20He was quite frail, exhausted from a 16-year battle with cancer.
53:26He died at his home on September 23, 1939.
53:34In one of the only recordings of his voice, Freud summarized his life's work.
53:39I started as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients.
53:48I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious, the role of instinctual urges, and so on.
54:01Out of these findings grew a new science, psychoanalysis, a path of psychology,
54:14and a new method of treatment of the neurosis. I had to pay heavily for this bit of good luck.
54:29People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavory.
54:40The system was strong and unrelenting. In the end I succeeded, but the struggle is not yet over.
54:54See you soon, Freud.
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