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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
It is a strange fact that people's opinions of psychoanalysis are only rarely tentative or unemphatic. It seems that one must either love it or hate it. Professor Cioffi, in a recent paper, has shown that he is no lover of psychoanalysis, and he makes what appears to be a devastating attack on Freud's theories and methods and on the credibility of the whole psychoanalytic discipline. Without wanting to ally myself wholeheartedly with the opposite camp, I want to show that many of the main contentions of his paper are wrong. I shall argue that the objections he makes which, if valid, would be the most serious for Freudian theory, are unfounded.
1 Cioffi, F., ‘Freud and the Idea of a Pseudo-Science’, Explanation in the Behavioural Sciences, Borger, R. and Cioffi, F. (eds.) (Cambridge University Press, 1970)Google Scholar. All page references not otherwise indicated are to this paper, the comment on it by B. A. Farrell and the reply to this by Cioffi.
2 Jones, E., Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, Vol. 1 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 298.Google Scholar
3 C.P., Vol. 2, 118–119Google Scholar. (‘C.P.’ will be used to refer to the five volumes of Freud's Collected Papers, trans. Riviere, J. and , A. and Strachey, J. (London: Hogarth Press, 1924–1950)Google Scholar. ‘S.E.’ will refer to The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. Strachey, J. (London: Hogarth Press, 1951–1974)Google Scholar. In reproducing a passage from Freud which Cioffi quotes, I shall keep to the form of words used by Cioffi. Since he used a variety of editions of Freud's works, there will sometimes be slight discrepancies between the wording of a quotation and the corresponding passage referred to in the Collected Papers or Standard Edition.)
4 Between ‘… conditions for a neurosis’ and ‘This warns us never …’.
5 C.P., Vol. 2, 119.Google Scholar
6 S.E., Vol. 20, 129.Google Scholar
7 S.E., Vol. 14, 69.Google Scholar
8 Preface to Psychoanalysis and the War Neuroses, S.E., Vol. 17Google Scholar, and C.P., Vol. 5.
9 See S.E., Vol. 18, 12.Google Scholar
10 S.E., Vol. 11, 46.Google Scholar
11 S.E., Vol. 16, 359.Google Scholar
12 S.E., Vol. 7, 166.Google Scholar
13 C.P., Vol. 2, 235.Google Scholar
14 Ibid., 234. Note that it was from the same paper, one page further on, that Cioffi quoted the passage which he found so objectionable.
15 See Robbins, L. C., ‘The Accuracy of Parental Recall of Aspects of Child Development and of Child Rearing Practices’, J. Abnorm. Soc. Psychol. 66 (1963), 261–270CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. Robbins compared retrospective accounts by parents of child rearing with reports they made at the time and found, in spite of a lapse of only three years, considerable inaccuracies, the greatest of these being over items dealing with the age of weaning and toilet training, the occurrence of thumb sucking and demand feeding.
16 C.P., Vol. 5, 182.Google Scholar
17 e.g. ‘Beginners in psychoanalysis are apt to … suppose that the moment at which one of the patient's unconscious complexes has become known to them is also the moment at which the patient himself recognizes it’ (C.P., Vol. 3, 262).Google Scholar
18 C.P., Vol. 2, 222.Google Scholar
19 Ibid., 221.
20 C.P., Vol. 5, 368.Google Scholar
21 Ibid., 231.
22 S.E., Vol. 21, 130.Google Scholar
23 C.P., Vol. 2, 39.Google Scholar
24 Ibid., 40.
25 C.P., Vol. 3, 158.Google Scholar
26 Ibid., 275.
27 ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’, S.E., Vol. 10Google Scholar, and C.P., Vol. 3.
28 C.P., Vol. 3, 150.Google Scholar
29 Ibid., 245.
30 E.g. ‘If I have described children as “polymorphously perverse”, … no moral judgement was implied by the phrase’ (S.E., Vol. 20, 38).Google Scholar
31 E.g. ‘According to classical theory, the human infant is “polymorphously perverse”, i.e. his infantile sexual wishes are not canalized in any one direction’. (Rycroft, C., A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), 121–122).Google Scholar
32 ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’, S.E., Vol. 7Google Scholar, and C.P., Vol. 3.
33 C.P., Vol. 3, 21.Google Scholar
34 See McGuire, W. (ed.), The Freud-Jung Letters (London: Hogarth Press and Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 587Google Scholar. It is worth pointing out that the identity of Freud's patient was only revealed after his death.
35 ‘The Sexual Enlightenment of Children’, S.E., Vol. 9Google Scholar, and C.P., Vol. 2.
36 I should like to record my thanks to Robert Kirk for helpful comments on the first drafts of this paper.
