Replacing Freud

What’s the latest scientific insight about unconscious beliefs, desires, and motivations? Do contemporary experimental psychologists do any better than Freud? Could anyone do worse? On this week’s show we’re asking: What has replaced Freud?

What’s the latest scientific insight about unconscious beliefs, desires, and motivations? Do contemporary experimental psychologists do any better than Freud? Could anyone do worse? On this week’s show we’re asking: “What Has Replaced Freud?”

If, like me, you’re not a huge fan of Freud, you might think it’s a good thing that Freud has now been replaced. But to give credit where credit is due, Freud did popularize the idea that we don’t always know why we do the things we do.

To be clear, this was not at all a new idea. The ancient Epicurean philosopher Lucretius believed we have an unconscious fear of death that motivates us to act in irrational ways. In the nineteenth century, Thomas Huxley compared conscious thought to the causally inert steam whistle of a locomotive, contributing nothing to the movement of the train. That same century in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche described our so-called “motives” for action as “mere surface phenomena of consciousness,” byproducts of the real, underlying causes of our action, which remain hidden to us. 

By the time Freud came along in the twentieth century, the idea that we have unconscious beliefs and desires had already been explored by many thinkers. Freud’s contribution was to bring these ideas more into mainstream consciousness (if you’ll pardon the pun!). Nowadays everyone is familiar with the idea that there’s a lot we don’t know about ourselves, there are parts of ourselves that we cannot consciously access. We can thank Freud for that.

Perhaps we should give Freud even a bit more credit. Not only did he popularize the concept of the unconscious, but, ironically, his research also led to ideas about the unconscious gaining a new kind of of scientific respectability. I say “ironically” because Freud’s own theories are not exactly scientific… Boys want to kill their fathers and sleep with their mothers, women wish they had penises and envy men for that reason… There isn’t a shred of evidence for many of Freud’s claims, and that’s precisely why he’s fallen out of favor now.

Psychology, like any other science, is not static. Scientific theories that were once thought to be true are later proven to be false. We used to think the Earth was flat and at the center of the universe, but now we know it’s round and revolves around the sun. Chemists used to think there was a fire-like substance called phlogiston that is released in combustion, but we know now about oxidation. And biologists used to think that maggots appeared spontaneously out of rotting food; now we know that flies lay eggs. 

Science evolves and changes. We should not expect every theory of the twentieth century to hold up in the twenty-first century. And when theories are refuted and replaced, it doesn’t show that they weren’t scientific to begin with.

The problem, however, is that Freud’s findings were never scientific in the first place. For a theory to be considered scientific, it has to be arrived at using the scientific method. Hypotheses have to be tested using empirical evidence or observations. 

Moreover, the findings have to be replicable. What does this mean? Let’s say you’re conducting an experiment: to see how people’s judgments are influenced by factors they are not aware of, and you get a certain result—that holding a warm cup of coffee leads people to develop positive opinions about a stranger, whereas holding a cold drink leads them to develop negative opinions. 

This is actually a famous experiment by contemporary psychologist John Bargh. It sounds interesting, right? The problem is that when other psychologists tried to replicate this experiment, they could never get quite the same result as Bargh. You can see why this would be a problem—if the experiment is not replicable, you’d have to question its scientific legitimacy. You’d have serious doubts that there was ever any real effect discovered about how beverage temperatures unconsciously affect our perceptions about strangers we meet.

Bargh’s experiments in “social priming” are not the only ones that have failed to replicate. In fact, contemporary experimental psychology is experiencing what’s being called a “replication crisis,” and it has hit theories that posit unconscious influences on our behavior the most.

So, we have to ask whether what replaced Freud is faring any better than Freud. It should be noted, of course, that Freud does not have the problem that his experiments failed to replicate. But that’s because he never conducted any scientific experiments in the first place, so there’s nothing to even try to replicate. And, despite the replication crisis, there’s still plenty of psychological science that does hold up. We should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. 

Our guest this week is Stanford’s Blakey Vermeule, author of The New Unconscious: A Literary Guided Tour. She shares some of these worries about the psychological theories that have replaced Freud’s, and how much of their experimental findings have failed to replicate. She is also worried about their underlying economic framework, which focuses on consumer choices and market driven incentives for behavior.

Join us for what’s going to be a fascinating conversation!