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 BrĂŒcke,
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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