The Legacy of Freud

John Perry
Sexual Repression

Ken Taylor
Castration Anxiety

John Perry
The Freudian Slip

Paul Robinson
Keeping track of where Freud has influenced us is very difficult, and it’s certainly not just in the intellectual realm.

John Perry
Why has Freud had such a lasting legacy?

Ken Taylor
Haven’t psychologists today totally abandoned Freud’s ideas?

Paul Robinson
Everything in Freud comes out of Shakespeare. Hamlet’s where the Oedipus complex comes from.

John Perry
Were Freud’s theories scientific?

Paul Robinson
Think of him alongside, James Joyce, or Franz Kafka, rather than alongside some 19th century scientist.

Ken Taylor
If Freud’s theories were so unscientific, then why are they so widely recognized still today?

Paul Robinson
You’re leaving out the sex part.

Ken Taylor
Our guest is Paul Robinson, author of Freud and His Critics.

Paul Robinson
What I discovered in Freud was you really can’t change.

Manhattan
You honestly think that I tried to run you over? Well, what would Freud say? Freud would say I really wanted to run her over—that’s why he was a genius.

John Perry
The Legacy of Freud—coming up on Philosophy Talk.

Ken Taylor
This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

John Perry
…except your intelligence. I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. We’re coming to you from the Marsh Theatre—the Bay Area’s breeding ground for new performance.

John Perry
Our thinking originates at philosophers corner across the bay at the Stanford University campus. That’s where Ken and I hang out and philosophize.

Ken Taylor
Welcome, everyone to Philosophy Talk.

Today, it’s the Legacy of Freud.

John Perry
Well Ken, I know that lots of people see Freud as one of the towering intellectual figures of the 20th century.

Ken Taylor
And rightly so John. He was the father of modern psychology, a founder of psychoanalysis. He wasn’t the first to think about the idea of unconscious beliefs and desires.

John Perry
Well, he wasn’t the first by a longshot. That was Epicurus’s idea 2000 years ago.

Ken Taylor
Okay, I grant you that but unlike Epicurus John, Freud developed rich and detailed scientific hypotheses about the exact workings of the unconscious mind. I mean, he single handedly changed the way we all think about ourselves once and for all for all time.

John Perry
Well, Freud’s theories were rich and detailed, I give you that, but they were false. All of these main ideas from the Oedipal complex, the penis envy, castration, anxiety, his obsession with sexual repression, all of us is turned out to be wrong. And in addition, his views are just shot through with patriarchal and sexist dogma.

Ken Taylor
John, you’re being way too harsh.

John Perry
I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m being too harsh. I think a scientific establishment would would agree with me. There’s probably some psycho and I analytic cult that continues to worship at the feet of Freud, the master. Some people still take Freud quite seriously in literature. And I suppose even to a certain extent in our own discipline of philosophy, but genuine scientific psychologist, no way.

Ken Taylor
Oh, come on, John. The details of Freud’s theory may have fallen out of scientific favor, I’m willing to grant you that but the scientific spirit of Freud that still lives. What was Freud’s greatest insight, his greatest insight was that most of what goes on in the mind is hidden from our conscious view. He taught us that our conscious self is a result of a complex interplay of subterranean forces. Now, I’m willing to bet you dollars to donuts that every single post Freudian scientific psychology still believes that.

John Perry
But the details matter if we’re talking science, and not just say, literature, take his tripart division of the mind into the id, the ego and the super ego. That’s a pretty theory, a nice theory ripped off from Plato, of course, but nevertheless, quite pretty, but it’s just false. There’s not a shred of empirical evidence for it. Despite Freud’s protestations to the contrary, in the end, his theories were not scientific at all.

Ken Taylor
Oh, come on, just because a theory turns out to be false, that doesn’t mean it’s not scientific. by that measure, John, Newton’s theories aren’t scientific either, but that that’s an absurd view that even you believe that.

John Perry
Oh, come on. Newton was one of the greatest scientists in history. You can’t begin to compare Freud with Newton.

Ken Taylor
Of course you can. Come on Freudian psychology is actually related to modern psychology in exactly the way that Newtonian physics is related to modern physics. Sure, modern psychology is superseded. It was superseded Freudian psychology, okay. But modern physics supersedes Newtonian physics, but nobody I mean, you would say that Newtonian physics is totally false or unscientific. So you shouldn’t say the same thing about Freudian psychology either.

John Perry
But there’s a big difference. Newton’s theories are extraordinarily good approximations of later physical theories. They’re still useful use everyday and engineering. You can’t say anything like that for Freud. Penis Envy isn’t even approximately true it’s just playing.

Ken Taylor
Why are you so darn to determine the deny Freud his due? I don’t get it.

John Perry
Nothing personal, just a healthy dose of scientific realism.

Ken Taylor
Are you completely sure about that? Did you have a bad experience with a Freudian psychoanalyst something that would explain your behavior maybe you’re repressing your resentment, and sublimating it into obsessive compulsive scientific realism. Would you like to talk about it, John?

John Perry
Puhleeze — spare me your armchair psychology analysis. You can leave that to the so called expert.

Ken Taylor
I’d be happy to actually you know, I’m really curious to know what practicing psychotherapists think of Freud today. Do they see him as a Newton like figure on whose shoulders they all still stand? Are they like you and they’d rather forget about him and consign Freud to the dustbin of history?

John Perry
Well, to help us answer those questions, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Caitlin Esch. She went out to explore modern psychotherapy and Freud’s continuing relevance. She files this report.

Caitlin Esch
What do you think of when you hear the name Sigmund Freud?

Speaker 1
The Oedipal cycle.

Speaker 2
Leather couches upon which we lay while getting psychotherapy.

Speaker 1
I think of the id.

Speaker 2
I think of this axiom of Freud’s that my father likes to repeat, which is that Freud said that facial hair was an attempt to genitalize the face.

Caitlin Esch
Okay, I couldn’t find any proof for that last one. But other words come to mind: Freudian slips, anal retentiveness, and of course, penis envy.

Neil Brast
These are ideas he gave birth to in the context of a patriarchal misogynistic turn of the century society.

Caitlin Esch
Neil Brast is a psychotherapist in Palo Alto, California. Though many of Freud’s theories seem preposterous today, when Brassed found Freud as a young student, the work resonated with him. Brassed admired for its concern his thoughtfulness and curiosity, and it gave him hope.

Neil Brast
He had a curious interested in non judgmental approach to people. he prescribes to practitioners how to construct an atmosphere of safety in the consulting room, through things like neutrality, curiosity, interest, confidentiality.

Caitlin Esch
When Brast is with a patient, he says, Freud looms large in the room. After all, Freud helped invent the talking cure or psychotherapy in the mid 1890s. And he helped develop the rules that almost all therapists use today.

Neil Brast
Freud recommended that we listen to people in a different way, that we listen beyond the specific story that they’re telling us and hear the underlying emotions, the internal struggles and what is not being said.

Speaker 1
Before Sigmund Freud, man believed that what he said and did with a product of his conscious will alone. But the great psychologist demonstrated the existence of another part of our mind, which functions in darkest secrecy, and can even rule our lives.

Neil Brast
Unconscious mental processes are ubiquitous. And we’re not aware of them directly. In a sense, we hide from ourselves a lot of what’s inside ourselves because it’s unpleasant.

Caitlin Esch
In the final year of his life, Freud was interviewed by the BBC, it’s his only known recording, he had oral cancer at that point and speaking was incredibly painful.

Sigmund Freud
People did not believe my facts and thought my theories unsavoury. Resistance was strong and unrelenting. In the end, I succeeded in acquiring pupils and building up an international psychoanalytic association.

Caitlin Esch
Freud’s contributions, particularly his ideas about the unconscious, live on for Neil Brast. But the psychoanalyst also admires Freud himself. The man who lived through the Nazis, supported his extended family during war, and battled painful cancer in the final decade of his life. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Caitlin Esch.

John Perry
Thanks, Caitlin, for that interesting perspective, or set of perspectives on Sigmund Freud. I’m John Perry, along with my fellow philosopher, Stanford, Ken Taylor. We’re coming to you from the Marsh Theatre in Berkeley, California.

Ken Taylor
Our guest today is a professor of history at Stanford University who teaches extensively about European thought in the 19th and 20th centuries, and he’s author of “Freud and His Critics.” Please welcome to the Philosophy Talk stage, Paul Robinson.

John Perry
Paul, you’re an intellectual historian, not a psychologist. So what got you interested in this guy Freud or you have some painful memory that you’re repressing and don’t want to talk about it?

Paul Robinson
No doubt, no doubt. I got interested in Freud when I was an undergraduate this a long time ago. And I started getting the idea I might become a scholar and intellectual historian of the 20th century. If you want to do that Freud looms large as a figure you’ve got to come to terms with. So there’s a professional element here, but there’s also a personal side to it. It’s got nothing to do with penis envy Oedipal complexes, or anything like that. But Freud sort of came to my personal rescue in a way when I was an undergraduate, and that when I went to Yale, I became a serious Roman Catholic, went to Mass every day, and was involved in a profound effort at self transformation, as Christians are supposed to. Thought I could make myself into a better and maybe a really different human being. And Freud sort of rescued me from this project.

Ken Taylor
There you go.

Paul Robinson
It was a story. And when I discovered in Freud was the proposition, you really can’t change, like, ah, learn to live within the you know, except the kind of fundamental thing you are, it’s not going to change.

John Perry
Accept who you are. And if you need to hire a shrink to help you.

Paul Robinson
Yeah. Which I never did. I’ve never been analyzed. So I’m, in that sense, innocent.

John Perry
So. So in terms of, of intellectual figures, is Freud, just intellectually interesting? Because he kind of had a big impact? Or is there something worth believing in his theories?

Paul Robinson
I’m not sure about believing if you’re an intellectual store, and you don’t think in terms of, is it right, or is it wrong? I think about Freud the same way I think about Marx, and in a certain sense of about Darwin, knees are monumentally influential, novel and complex, ambitious thinkers, who, you know, attract our attention, not because they’re right or wrong, but because precisely of this innovativeness, this imaginativeness, the largeness of their intellect.

Ken Taylor
Okay, you’re an intellectual historian. And it’s certainly true that your intellectual distorting you imagining the intellectual influence of Freud in the 20th century. It’s massive, of course, there’s many spheres of Freud’s influence, there’s literature, there’s to a lesser extent, philosophy, and then there’s psychology, psychological science. Now, where would you say Freud’s influence has been the greatest isn’t in literature and humanities? Or is it actually in the psychological sciences? I mean, that’s his…

Paul Robinson
Yeah, that’s a good historical question. Actually, I think his greatest influences perhaps been outside the intellectual realm. It’s, you know, Dr. Spock’s baby book that we’ve all been brought up on, deeply influenced by Freudian thinking. So it’s keeping track of where Freud is influenced us is very difficult, and it’s certainly not just in the intellectual realm. I don’t know a whole lot about modern psychology as a science or as a profession. I think it varies in my university. They have nothing to do with Freud. As far as I can tell, he’s a relic, an incorrect relic. But I think there are other places that are more sympathetic see him as an important forbear important.

Ken Taylor
I gotta tell you, I when I was an undergraduate, I started off as a psych major in the 70s. But the psychology professors were I was at Notre Dame in those days, they were all still behaviorist. And they definitely thought Freud was a relic. And they thought it as just a budget of mistakes and mis guided thing. But if you were to ask who’s be whose influence is greater now, the behaviorist or Freud might still put my money on Freud on that one.

John Perry
Even even in that era, that, you know, psychology has many parts in personality theory, was always kind of non behaviorist and influenced by Freud. Maybe it didn’t show up at Notre Dame as much as it did elsewhere.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, that’s true. So it’s a sort of weighing up. Look, Freud’s influence given all the spheres in which he was influential, is a kind of complicated thing. This is Philosophy Talk, coming to you from the Marsh Theatre in Berkeley. We’re asking you about the legacy of Freud. Our guest is Paul Robinson from Stanford University.

John Perry
Freud proposed a scientific study of the mind through psychoanalysis. But were Freud’s own methods really scientific? Or should we consider his views pseudoscience?

Ken Taylor
Freud, science, and pseudoscience—along with questions from our non-repressed audience, when Philosophy Talk continues.

The Plāto’nes
It proves that I’ll have the last laugh on you, because instead of one head, I’ve got two. And you know, two heads are better than one.

John Perry
Thanks to our musical guests, the Plto’nes. This is Philosophy Talk, and I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
And I’m Ken Taylor. Our guest is historian Paul Robinson, and we’re talking about the legacy of Freud.

John Perry
Do you think of Freud as a pioneering scientist of the mind or as a pseudo scientific charlatan? Then what would Freud say about what you think? This is thinking or resonate with? You can join the discussion by stepping up to the microphone in front of the stage.

Ken Taylor
Paul, when John and I were talking earlier, John was really dismissive of Freud’s theories is kind of pseudoscience. I’m not sure that’s fair picture of Freud at all. But let’s start with his own self conception. What how did he think of himself as a scientist, literary critic, perhaps even as a philosopher?

Paul Robinson
Now he thought of himself as a scientist, no question about it. Although some people suggest in tribe try to rescue him from this self identification, particularly Habermas that he made a mistake when he claimed to be a scientist. It’s really more like a literary critic.

Ken Taylor
He, he, he thought, a lot of ideas from philosophy. I mean, he borrowed a lot of ideas from Plato, the three parts division of the soul, he was heavily influenced by nature, I think. But I have the sense that he didn’t actually think much of philosophy even though he could philosophically.

Paul Robinson
That is absolutely true what he was contemptuous of philosophy. Even though it’s been proved he took a lot of philosophy classes when he was a medical student from France, fentanyl took a course on Aristotle.

Ken Taylor
So why was he more about philosophy? Then? Why was he so contemptuous of philosophy?

Paul Robinson
Because he thought philosophers could say anything. He thought it was just hot air.

John Perry
Well, if philosophers can say anything, then it would be surprising if it was all hot air.

Ken Taylor
But theu would only accept that okay, but look, so he thought of himself as a scientist. He thought of psychoanalysis his scientific undertaking as a sizing of psychology. But I mean, right? Where all these theories of his come from that today have, I gotta say, almost no scientific Credence? No, no. castration anxiety. All these is personality theory, you know, a no return all that sort of stuff. This arrested personality stuff. There’s no evidence for any of it. So how did he convince himself of that stuff?

Paul Robinson
Well, he was a man of it’s been said in the in the setup, he was a man of his time at the late 19th century, Freud was 44. In 1900, long prep is his education is in the 19th century. In a way, he’s no different from Marx, in claiming to be a scientist, everybody in the late 19th century, who wants to be taken seriously claimed to be a scientist. And you know, and Darwin, of course, claimed to be a scientist, but and his claim to be a scientist was contested in the late 19th century saying, this is just a fanatical idea, natural selection that Darwin’s come up with, and he’s manufacturing evidence to make it out that it’s empirical. So I said, The issue here is what do we mean by science, which is a historical thing.

John Perry
But I think Freud himself would have said, well, you know, I have a lot of empirical evidence, because I talk to people who are troubled, and then I tried to develop theories, that makes the best sense of it. And then I also look into other bits of evidence, like literature, and so forth, and so on, and then dreams. So what do scientists do they they come up with theories that make sense of as much as the data as they can? So I don’t have any trouble with Freud thinking of himself as a scientist.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, I get your point, John, but here’s here’s something that has always puzzled me. For a long time, it’s puzzled me Freud’s influence in psychology. I mean, there’s one enduring, as we said, in the open, there’s one enduring insight that Freud had big and important insight that the conscious mind is just the tip of the iceberg. Yeah. And it’s a complex subterranean stuff going on there. Hardly anybody believes that the unconscious mind operates along Freudian principles anymore, but almost everybody believes in some sense. We’re all Freudians. Now to that extent, okay. But here’s the thing that puzzle used to puzzle I haven’t thought about it a long time used to puzzle me a lot. Okay, as the scientific influence of Freud waned his influence in like literary theory and places like that was like going full buzz. Right. Well, what explains that asymmetry? How could How could Floyd persist as influential in the humanities and, and but love his scientific influence was waning?

Paul Robinson
Well, one way to answer that would be say he was a literary figure, an imaginary figure from the start. That’s what Harold Bloom says. He says, everything in Freud comes out of Shakespeare. Come, you know, Hamlet, Hamlet, where the Oedipus complex come from, and that he that we want to understand Freud’s enduring or continuing influence. Think of him alongside James Joyce, or Franz Kafka, rather than alongside some 19th-century scientist.

John Perry
But I mean, what if you think of it this way that look, I mean, think the future of illusion Moses and monotheism, maybe those weren’t central to Freud’s project, but, but he really gave us a complex way of dealing with a lot of phenomena that Christianity dealt with. That was a totally different, intellectually rich, very applicable and maybe to applicable. Coming up with explanations for things and as an alternative to religious system.

Paul Robinson
Absolutely right. And I agree with those precisely those books I mean, Freud is an analyst of and critic of religion resonates profoundly with me in the future of illusion or in the in the Moses book, which is really asked the question, What’s distinctive about Judaism? Why does anti semitism prevail in the European?

Ken Taylor
So if Freud were Allah around now to see his reception in the 21st century, and you could see, and he could see that? Well, you know, in certain kinds of literary cultural interpretations, circles, he still has some kind of influence and some kind of hold on the imagination. Well, in scientific circles, he has far less hold on the imagination. Would he be disappointed?

Paul Robinson
He would be? I think he would be Yeah. But maybe he would be pleased to see he’s such a big name, you know, who knows, he might be very happy. I thought it might be over by now. But here I am. Big time.

John Perry
I mean, Freud, certainly in various places, is what we would now call some kind of physical it’s that is he thought he was ultimately talking about the brain and structures in the brain, I could be very disappointed to find that brain science isn’t, isn’t further coordinating with his views.

Ken Taylor
You’re listening to philosophy. We’re talking about the legacy of Freud in front of a live audience at the Mars theater. And we’ve got some questions from that live audience. Welcome to Philosophy Talk, ma’am.

Melanie
Hi, thank you. My name is Melanie, and I’m from Berkeley. And I’m just, well, I don’t really subscribe to that to the facts of Freudian ism, it seems to me that you guys are talking about this in a very binary mate way. He either is or isn’t a scientist. But it also seems to me like with math, if you go far enough out with math, you get to philosophy, can there be some kind of more unifying point of view to be more inclusive?

Ken Taylor
That’s a really good question. And I do think that Freud had a noble ambition and one that I share, that is to ground cultural interpretation and the interpretation of human behavior and the narration of human behavior, in part, at least partly in but not totally, but at least partly in sound science. So the continuity between science and cultural interpretation is something that Freud was a big advocate of, and that’s a noble ambition, but it’s got to be sound science, you can’t take that the scientifically grounded cultural interpretation, and then say, well, the science doesn’t matter. I don’t know. What do you think about that?

Paul Robinson
No, I agree with you. I agree that we I have the American prejudices, as Freud would have called it, that this when you come up with these ideas, you need some kind of outside controls, some kind of control group in which you don’t have the analyst President eliciting these interpretations. So I think there’s something to be said for that he has scientific ambitions. He doesn’t live up in practice, do what you’d have to do to make the assertion scientific

John Perry
In that point. There is a well known critique by Ada Greenbaum that is mostly aimed at his scientific methodology and feels that Freud fell short by his own standard. Yes, that’s exactly what Greenbaum is Greenbaum, right about Freud’s ambitions.

Paul Robinson
Yes, yeah. No, I will. I’m not sure whether or not he had messed with a lot scientifically methodological views. That may be a stretch on Greenbaum Spark, but there’s, there’s something to it.

Ken Taylor
We got another question from my live audience. Welcome to philosophy talks.

Brent
Thank you. My name is Brent, and I’m from Kensington nearby. And I was wondering if you would make a comment or two about Freud’s contribution to dreams. And whether or not we can resolve drives and problems that we’re facing through dreams and perhaps dreams have cathartic effect as well, to heal us.

Paul Robinson
I pay attention to my dreams, and they never seem to correspond to the kinds of dreams that Freud talks about. One of the big, big problems in his dream theory was how do you explain anxiety dreams, because the hypothesis in Freud is that dreams are wish fulfillment, right? All dreams, and they and the wishes originate in childhood. And when I look at my dreams that you remind me, I have academic dreams. I’m like, really good. I’m going to the wrong room for my lecture. What’s the wish? Yeah. But you know.

Ken Taylor
So Freud’s theory of dreams, in one sense, has very little credence among psychologists to think about dreams. But here’s something that Freud did do. Again, let’s contrast Freud to the behaviorist. Freud was much more of a cognitive scientists, in a certain sense than the behaviorist psychologists were the behaviorist psychologist basically said, the mind says is blackbox it’s got no inner mental mechanisms, right? And we just talked about behavior. Well, that theory has a whole bunch of problems, a whole bunch of problem of making sense of dreams a behaviorist. So it’s two great psychological movements in the 20th century behaviorism and early 20th century and Freudian psychology and then cognitive science arise it favors couldn’t make it tale about dreams. At least Freud thinks of dreams as some complex psychodynamic, the outcome of some complex psychodynamic process. Now, nobody believes he got the psychodynamics of dreams right anymore. And dreams are really complicated stuff for Psychology Today.

John Perry
But, but still, you know, well, as I understand it, I mean, Freud in the interpretation of dreams is a long argument just to convince you that dreams aren’t just random that there’s something going on. And he points to earlier theories about dreams as as foretelling the future, and so forth as people’s recognition of at least that nowadays, people, I think the most popular theory of dreams is like when you’re when you’re doing the, it’s cleaning out the files on your computer, it’s mad as though you’re just like trying to read the random stuff on on your computer, when you’re ditching all the redundant files and old things and trying to make sense of it. I must admit, I think the truth must be somewhere in between. I mean, I have too many recurring dreams that involve the same anxieties over and over again, I’m, I’ve somehow lost my job at Stanford, because they found out I didn’t have an undergraduate degree. And so I’m back in college trying to finish my undergraduate degree. And I have to take a math class, and I just can’t. I mean, I have that dream, maybe, you know, once a month now, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t think a random file feeding system would come up with that. So I think there’s something in between, right.

Ken Taylor
But I don’t think about being fair to the contemporary theory. There’s a lot of work about dreams. And here’s a Freudian element, but not at all like the details of Freud, in contemporary thinking about dreams. It is all this random stuff being generated is like a memory dump. But the the mind is an inveterate interpreter of of its own goings on. And so this random stuff makes the mind say what the devil is going on there. And so we throw out these confabulated interpretations just like we throw out confabulated interpretations of our waking life. So the theorizing, confabulating part of the mind that not Freud, but it’s not it’s not that far. It’s not that far from Freud. But we’ve got another question from our live audience. Welcome to philosophy Talk.

Neil
Thank you very much. My name is Neil and I have to tell you, I am a psychoanalyst in San Francisco.

Ken Taylor
Oh good, we need you. Are you a Freudian psychoanalyst?

Neil
I am a modern relational psycho analysts who teaches Freud Oh, anyway, when we talk, okay, here’s my question. Um, maybe let me float a proposition. And you can tell me what you think about this. Maybe one way to think about Freud is that he was more of a philosophical scientist, in this sense, much of what he says we don’t take seriously anymore. But some of the basic principles, for example, the existence of the unconscious, is given in Western society. So maybe it’s not so much a question of was he? Or was he not a scientist? But how do we think about Freudian psychoanalysis or psychodynamic theories? And what works and what doesn’t work?

Ken Taylor
I think that’s good. I mean, that’s what I was saying in the opening. I mean, I don’t know how psychoanalyst the day think of the details, the Freudian mechanisms? And is there still any credence in Freudian mechanisms and psychoanalytical serve? Is there still some, you know, some credence that it’s absolutely true?

Neil
Absolutely. But we also are very aware that, you know, these theories stopped developing in 1938. Right, and we’ve been thinking about this for another 80 years.

Ken Taylor
Right. So so I mean, I said, I wondered if you could regard Freud as like a Newton like figure on whose shoulder all subsequent psychologies, at least to the extent that we all believe in the unconscious, and that it works by mechanisms that we have to discover and aren’t just given to us. Some sets were off Freudians all posts all psychologist or post Freudian, but in terms of the details of the mechanisms, that’s that’s the hard part.

Neil
I like the comparison with Newton, I think that that really works.

Ken Taylor
Do you think that works,Paul?

Paul Robinson
Well, yes. Yeah, I agree with you entirely.

Ken Taylor
So I wonder in psychology in general, not psychoanalysis in particular, but in psychology in general. How is Freud taught now? Is he taught as just? Well, here’s a cool guy with some interesting ideas that we no longer believe, but they’re not really relevant or is he taught like Darwin’s thought Darwin started an inquiry going, that led to the, you know, from Darwin didn’t have a theory of how replication worked. We got them daily and gene that filled in something and then we got the discovery of DNA that filled it in more. So there was this progression from Darwin to the modern genetic synthesis. And that was a crucial thing in that it’s Freud like that. Is he like the Darwin of subsequent psychology or is he just a wrong term? Can you answer that?

Paul Robinson
Not the Darwin, that’s, he’s, you know, if marks is the guy who claimed to be a scientist, is we think of as least scientific in the 19th century, and Darwin is the one whose claim stance, Freud is somewhere in between, I think, he said, An intermediary figure. That’s why some people are claiming the way to revive him is through literature interpretation, and others still cling to the notion that it can be rehabilitated at science.

John Perry
So one issue we should pick up in the next segment that we haven’t talked about is the relation of feminism, the rise of feminism and the decline of Freud’s theory.

Paul Robinson
They go hand in hand, that’s a really absolutely go hand in hand.

Ken Taylor
Well, let’s dig into that in the next segment, you’re listening to Philosophy Talk. we’re analyzing the legacy of Freud with Paul Robinson, author of “Freud and His Critics.”

John Perry
Freudian slips, penis envy, the Oedipal complex. We’re all familiar with these concepts. We use them every day. But do they have any real merit?

Ken Taylor
We’re coming to you from the Marsh theater, the Bay Area’s breeding ground for new performance. We’ll take more questions from our live and lively audience when Philosophy Talk continues.

John Perry
Thanks to our live musical guests, the Plto’nes. I’m John Perry, this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ken Taylor
…except your intelligence. Our guest is Paul Robinson, author of “Freud and His Critics,” and we’re digging in to the legacy of Sigmund Freud. And, John, I want to go back to John’s question at the end of the last break, you told this touching story about how Freud liberated you from a misbegotten project. But, you know, Freud’s influence isn’t just cultural influence isn’t as good. He had female sexuality, so wrong. So completely, utterly wrong. It seems to me a liberation to get beyond Freud’s theory is especially of all human sexuality, but especially a female sexuality. What do you think about that?

Paul Robinson
Oh, absolutely. Right. And the Freud’s downfall over his fall from grace, which began in the 70s, and blossomed in the 80s. This is when he comes under attack began with feminists, who said not only that the female psychology, penis envy and so forth, was wrong, but it was positively hateful, and damaging. Yes. And oh, Kate Millett, I’m thinking over all the people who wrote books attacking him. And you know, I’m on their side entirely. So I think, you know, again, he’s a figure of the 19th century, he’s a patriarchal thinker. He always thinks of everything in terms of the male case, women are an afterthought.

Ken Taylor
Are envious of males!

John Perry
Which is probably—evolutionarily, it may mean opposite. Men are the afterthought.

Ken Taylor
But, so, but I want to expand on this. Okay, so looking at all the influence of Freud and literature, and our culture and our cultural practice and our self conceptions. I mean, would you say it’s a good thing or a bad thing? I mean, if you admit the feminist critique of Freud is correct. I mean, so I’ve heard Freud dismiss has patriarchal misogynistic, but if and here’s a huge cultural influence, if that is correct, if his influence was largely patriarchy, and misogyny means unbalance is better. So what—

Paul Robinson
More bad than good.

John Perry
It wasn’t like he came up with misogyny and male dominance.

Ken Taylor
No but he gave, he gave, he gave it the imprint of scientific psychology. Because whenever you have cultural movement, and it’s backed by the hegemony of science, they get even more powerful. So it’s even more important to not let him have that credential as grounded in science.

Paul Robinson
Yeah, Kate Miller said the patriarchy was just about dying out at the beginning of the 20th century, and along came Freud and rescued it with a new idea, you know, which set women back and I mean, I don’t quarrel that i i think is the value of the stock can survive. Critique. I think it’s, you know, the idea of the unconscious. The idea of the pervasive influence of sexuality, particularly, younger sexuality, in our lives, in our experience, can survive the excision of penis envy, and of the usual, really, wow, I think so.

Ken Taylor
As John pointed out, Epicurus, Plato, yeah, Nietzsche, well, he was a misogynist you. Anyway, but but the idea of the unconscious goes way back now. Now, it’s true that we kind of lost that with Descartes and all that, but, but nature was a big deal bringing that back. But so if the only thing we get out of Freud is that there is an unconscious whose mechanisms we need to really probe to understand human psychology, and we reject all the rest of it as misogynistic patriarchy I don’t think he gets the staff have much of a standing reputation. Well, I was the guy who took us in a huge, hugely influential wrong turn.

Paul Robinson
You’re leaving out the sex part, maybe because you want to focus on penis envy, but and it’s deeply unfair to attack people on the grounds that they’re repressing. You know, attack your intellectual energies all the problem with you, but he doesn’t know you. Yeah, that’s ad hominem argument. It’s totally unfair, even when it’s true.

John Perry
And it usually is.

Ken Taylor
You were about to say about my rejection of Freud as—

Paul Robinson
I think the the way in which he, if you think you’ve been coming after the Victorians brought sexuality, about sexual experience back to the center of the way we think about people, not just as a random or occasionally but it’s the center of our experience. I think that’s a long term influence.

John Perry
There’s something connected, connected with a feminism issue, I want it I want to just want to learn from you about there’s this whole seduction hypothesis, and some people are very bitter about that, that Freud had an idea that could have really been influential in focusing on on the amount of child abuse that goes on and he shied away from it.

Paul Robinson
Yeah, this is Jeffrey Mason’s critique of Freud that in 1896, in the early 1890s, he advanced the hypothesis that all mental illness all neuroses, or in every individual’s work caused by seductions in childhood real seduction sexual seduction, usually by a parent or relative. And he Vance’s in several papers. And then a year later in 1897, abandon it publicly abandonment said he’d been wrong. These introductions hadn’t happened to all of his patients. But then in many cases had simply been imagined. And maybe even wished for. This is referred to as the abandonment of the seduction hypothesis. And people in 1980s, like Jeffrey Mason, and some feminists as well accused Freud of having a band and a really important insight, because he was afraid that his fellow doctors would condemn Him for it, because we’re so obviously outlandish. So he got when when we were incredibly preoccupied with child abuse in the 1980s, with those daycare cases and school cases, Freud came in for attack once again, not for having talked about sexual experience in childhood, but for insisting that some of it or part of it came from inside the child.

John Perry
So since then, there’s been all this stuff about false memory. Yes, right. Latos daycare workers have been been, you know, freed and got big settlements, has Freud’s reputation on these lines have been somewhat resuscitated is really—

Paul Robinson
You would think that would be the fair thing to happen. But no, he gets he gets it from both sides. Both think he’s bad,

Ken Taylor
I just think it’s over determined. Uh, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Karola Kreitmair
Thank you. My name is Karola. I’m from San Francisco. I have a question for Professor Robinson. You said earlier that when you meet new people you do interpret their behavior according to unconscious motives you might attribute to them. But then you also just said that it’s ad hominem to attack someone on the basis of a repressed belief they might have. And I’m wondering if there is no empirical evidence for these unconscious motives? Don’t we have an obligation to try and rid ourselves of this way of evaluating and interpreting each other? Or is there some good or something actually accurate we can get at by using these Freudian unconscious motives at interpreting each other’s behavior.

Paul Robinson
I think it’s wrong to use these as a tool of argument when you’re having an intellectual debate with somebody else. I think you can’t say we just say that because something had happened to you in childhood. But I don’t think we are any longer capable of divorcing our interpretation of people from unconscious thoughts.

Ken Taylor
If we were really having an argument, I suppose I agree with you. But I think so much, that so many people say is driven by unconscious agendas on their part, and that we post Freudians posts Nietzsche and because this was a big deal with nature, too. I mean, it would be at and contemporary modern modern psychologists would said, human beings are great confabulate er is have their self images and all that. We can’t get back to the day where there’s just Plato’s seminar room. It’s not that doesn’t happen.

John Perry
If you’re a college teacher, and you deal with freshmen, these great bundles of parental expectations, hormones, and what they used to call into dorm DSB that dreaded semen buildup. And you’re sitting with him, they’re in your office and you hear their story of why they’re here or why they’re upset or this, that and the other. You just can’t help but construct a theory about what’s really going on how much is apparently expectation, how much is fear of parents so forth and so on. So in a way, I mean, you don’t sit around think about penis envy and stuff. But it is hard to approach people without constructing theories that we might not have thought of. It hadn’t been for Freud, maybe not. I mean, Epicurus wouldn’t have jarred me into it. I’ll tell you that.

Ken Taylor
Welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Anne
Hi, my name is Anne. I’m from El Cerrito. In her book ordinary losses. Judith Viorst relied a lot on on Freud’s theories about loss from the woman from early childhood. And I’m wondering how much resonance that still has today?

Paul Robinson
I don’t know the book. You have to tell me more. Tell us a little more little more.

Speaker 2
Well, I think I just did. She, she talked about how an individual’s growth develops out of the loss initially of the womb, and then of the breast. And then the all of the losses that we experienced growing up from the from birth through the loss of our parents through the loss of our youth, all of that.

John Perry
Sounds sounds Freudian to me. And I must say it sounds pretty plausible, too.

Ken Taylor
But see, but this is the difference. This is the thing, okay, as an author, as an interpreter of text, you’re free to adopt, it seems to me you’re you’re free to adopt any sort of scheme of interpretation. That makes coherent sense of whatever it is you’re trying to interpret the human narrative you’re free to adopt. And that’s what we do we adopt we humanist we adopt interpretive schemas of all kinds, you know, and some of them are wildly implausible. And some of them are, but they if they make sense, we feel good about this. And I think Freud over decades has had a huge influence in many in the interpretive humanities in any interpretive discipline. Right? And that’s, that goes back to something we said earlier. I mean, if you were to come here and say, oh, yeah, the people were in the business of interpreting humans, a lot of them still resonate to what I said, but then the people were in the business, not just of interpreting, but explaining in a scientific way, they’ve abandon this stuff. So the humanities are not constrained by scientific interpretation. I would like them to come together. And I think Freud wanted them to come together. But I think very often they come apart.

John Perry
Yeah, but I want to enter notice skepticism, their psychologist, whether they’re Freud or Skinner, or or modern psychologist just love to run off at the mouth, about stuff they don’t really know, before. They do a few experiments, and then all of a sudden, they tell you, they’re no character traits. Well, I mean, that’s a pretty big claim that’s to what they’ve actually discovered is that character traits don’t determine your behavior in in really marginal and unusual cases don’t say, no character traits. So there is a there’s the humanities on one side, there’s physics on the other side, there’s Economics and Psychology, in the in the social sciences in between, in which there is a little bit of empiricism there is a little bit of constraint theory making there is some, some quantification and then a spate of often best selling bull poop.

Ken Taylor
Yeah, that’s certainly true. There’s an old distinction of German distinction between natural disenchantment and guys’s business often, and how to reconcile these things, if you can, you know, this, the natural science in the spirit scientists, the human sciences, how to reconcile these two things in different methodologies. That’s a big question about which we ought to do is show some so far, give me a chance you got any?

Paul Robinson
Except I did, I mentioned who before already? I can’t remember. No. When When Freud died, 1939 Arden wrote a poem in which he said, he’s no longer a person now, but a whole climate of opinion.

Ken Taylor
Okay, well, Paul on that profound that I’m going to thank you for joining us.

Paul Robinson
My pleasure.

Ken Taylor
Our guest has been historian Paul Robinson from Stanford University, author of “Freud and His Critics.” So John, do you know what you’re thinking now?

John Perry
Do I know what I’m thinking? I haven’t been to the surface. I know, on the surface, what I know, I’m consciously thinking, I like to read Freud. He’s a great writer. I mean, he wrote future of an illusion. And then much later, Moses and monotheism, which actually, if you take the two of them, you have a critique of religion like we’re getting from a lot of people nowadays, plus in Moses monotheism and also an appreciation of the positive side of religion. So I think it was an extraordinarily insightful guy who published a lot, some of which is way off base.

Ken Taylor
Yeah. And he was a great cultural critic. I don’t deny that and he had a great ambition to ground that cultural criticism into real science. It’s just the the science that he was pretty doubtful about that. Pretty doubtful. But you know, this conversation continues on our blog. The blog dot philosophy talked about it where a model is coded. Ergo blog, I think, therefore I blog. You can also follow our tweets on Twitter and you can find out more by visiting our very active Facebook page.

John Perry
Now I wonder what Freud would say about a guy who talks really really fast maybe he’s trying to hide something. Let’s find out by listening to Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shaoles… In pop culture, the subconscious used to be as real as a dime.  Now, it’s just another blank space for advertisers.   I don’t think I’ve seen a therapist in a major role in a movie or teevee show since THE SOPRANOS, and even there, it was kind of a joke—the Mafia guy has a shrink, ha ha, until Tony started killing people. Freudianism drove much of 20th century pop culture.  Where would Woody Allen movies be without shrinks?  Or PSYCHO, which had the shrink popping up at the end to explain what went wrong with poor Norman Bates.  And psychoanlysis was glamorous!  Remember SPELLBOUND, the Hitchcock movie, with Ingrid Bergman as the analyst, Gregory Peck as a troubled yet dreamy amnesiac, dream sequences by Salvador Dali? Remembering randomly, there were SIXTH SENSE, DAVID AND LISA, THE PRESIDENT’S ANALYST, the THREE FACES OF EVE. My favorite was FORBIDDEN PLANET.  It didn’t really have a shrink, but it was way Freudian. An entire planet was destroyed!  By monsters from the Id!  For years, cartoons, fiction, movies, and television were peopled with handsome women wearing horn rim glasses and lab coats, pipe smoking men with goatees and sweaters with patched elbows.  The frightening hidden was revealed and trotted out for us as reasons why the killer killed, why the beautiful woman stole things, why Jimmy Stewart couldn’t help Kim Novak, why no leading lady would ever marry Gig Young.   And this trope of smooth-voiced men and women with the ability to glibly yet deeply explain the inexplicable, bled over from psychology into improbable physics.  Monster movies always had some pipe smoking deep-voiced scientist to explain things to his fiancé or little Timmy. Instead of analyzing a troubled hero, he would analyze a troubled monster, either deciphering why it wants to keep us out of the Black Lagoon, or what secret weapon might kill it.  Fifties movie scientists were turned into figures of authority dragging up secrets to which only they knew the answers.    What about the rest of us?  Psychoanalyst and movie fan Andrea Sabbadini told the English paper the Guardian,  “People who hide in the dark of a cinema for hours a day are certainly trying to avoid something about reality….  There’s an element of addiction which is close to being pathological.”  Well, that’s certainly overanalyzing the moviegoing experience.  We hardly even go out to the movies any more.  And when we do, theaters aren’t really womblike, are they?  They’re more like 3D echo chambers, full of loud noises, and flashing lights.  Not a place for true cinephile neurotics.  Today we stay home, watching movies on our big screens, stopping and starting them at will. The only experts left on teevee are on cooking channels or makeover shows.    And we don’t have experts in movies.  Well, we do, but they’re the secret identity of the nerds who turn into the superhero.  If we have shrinks they’re usually evil.  SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, remember?  That movie ends with one evil shrink stalking another, about to kill him and eat his liver with fava beans and a nice chianti.  I don’t get it.  Come on ghost of Norman Bates, turn the tables.  Appear unto us at the end of the movie, and explain it.  I gotta go.

John Perry
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of Ben Maniella productions and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, Copyright 2013.

Ken Taylor
Our executive producer is David timorous Stephanie Special thanks to Stephanie Wiseman and Erica Sokolower-Shain and also to James Hanley.

John Perry
Thanks also to Dan Brandon and Crystal Knickerson

Ken Taylor
The program is produced by the brilliance Devon Strolovitch. The one and only Laura Maguire is our Director of Research. Our marketing director is the smooth and suave Dave Millar, and Korola Kreitmair is our performance consultant.

John Perry
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the partners in our online community of thinkers

Ken Taylor
And from the members of KALW Local Public Radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

John Perry
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the views of Stanford University, or of our other funders.

Ken Taylor
Not even when they’re true and reasonable as they often are. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org.

John Perry
I’m John Perry.

Ken Taylor
I’m Ken Taylor. Thank you for listening.

John Perry
And thank you for thinking.