Hockenbury Discovering Psychology 5th txtbk

432 CHAPTER 10 PersonalityFor good or ill, Sigmund Freud, morethan any other explorer of the psyche,has shaped the mind of the20th century. The very fierceness andpersistence of his detractors are a wrytribute to the staying power of Freud’sideas.PETER GAY (1999)Step by step, we are learning thatFreud has been the most overratedfigure in the entire history of scienceand medicine—one who wroughtimmense harm through the propaga -tion of false etiologies, mistakendiagnoses, and fruitless lines of inquiry.FREDERICK CREWS (2006)Anna Freud (1895–1982) Freud’syoungest daughter, Anna, becamehis chief disciple and was herselfthe founder of a psychoanalyticschool. Expanding on her father’stheory, she applied psychoanalysisto therapy with children. She isshown here addressing a debate onpsychoanalysis at the SorbonneUniversity in Paris in 1950.Lack of TestabilityMany psychoanalytic concepts are so vague and ambiguous that they are impossibleto objectively measure or confirm (Crews, 2006; Grünbaum, 2006). For example,how might you go about proving the existence of the id or the superego? Or howcould you operationally define and measure the effects of the pleasure principle, thelife instinct, or the Oedipus complex?Psychoanalytic “proof” often has a “heads I win, tails you lose” style to it. In otherwords, psychoanalytic concepts are often impossible to disprove because even seeminglycontradictory information can be used to support Freud’s theory. For example, if yourmemory of childhood doesn’t jibe with Freud’s description of the psychosexual stagesor the Oedipus complex, well, that’s because you’ve repressed it. Freud himself was notimmune to this form of reasoning (Robinson, 1993). When one of Freud’s patientsreported dreams that didn’t seem to reveal a hidden wish, Freud interpreted the dreamsas betraying the patient’s hidden wish to disprove Freud’s dream theory!As Freud acknowledged, psychoanalysis is better at explaining past behavior thanat predicting future behavior (Gay, 1989). Indeed, psychoanalytic interpretationsare so flexible that a given behavior can be explained by any number of completelydifferent motives. For example, a man who is extremely affectionate toward his wifemight be exhibiting displacement of a repressed incestuous urge (he is displacing hisrepressed affection for his mother onto his wife), reaction formation (he actuallyhates his wife intensely, so he compensates by being overly affectionate), or fixationat the oral stage (he is overly dependent on his wife).Nonetheless, several key psychoanalytic ideas have been substantiated by empiricalresearch (Cogan & others, 2007; Westen, 1990, 1998). Among these are the ideasthat (1) much of mental life is unconscious; (2) early childhood experiences have acritical influence on interpersonal relationships and psychological adjustment; and(3) people differ significantly in the degree to which they are able to regulate theirimpulses, emotions, and thoughts toward adaptive and socially acceptable ends.SexismMany people feel that Freud’s theories reflect a sexist view of women. Because penisenvy produces feelings of shame and inferiority, Freud (1925) claimed, women aremore vain, masochistic, and jealous than men. He also believed that women are moreinfluenced by their emotions and have a lesser ethical and moral sense than men.As Horney and other female psychoanalysts have pointed out, Freud’s theoryuses male psychology as a prototype. Women are essentially viewed as a deviationfrom the norm of masculinity (Horney, 1926; Thompson, 1950). Perhaps, Horneysuggested, psychoanalysis would have evolved an entirely different view of womenif it were not dominated by the male point of view.To Freud’s credit, women were quite active inthe early psychoanalytic movement. Several femaleanalysts became close colleagues of Freud (Freeman& Strean, 1987; Roazen, 1999, 2000). And,it was Freud’s daughter Anna, rather than any of hissons, who followed in his footsteps as an eminentpsychoanalyst. Ultimately, Anna Freud became herfather’s successor as leader of the international psychoanalyticmovement.The weaknesses in Freud’s theory and in the psychoanalyticapproach to personality are not minor problems.All the same, Freud made some extremely significantcontributions to modern psychological thinking.Most important, he drew attention to the existence andinfluence of mental processes that occur outside consciousawareness, an idea that continues to be activelyinvestigated by today’s psychological researchers.