…so how does that make you feel?
Freud is truly in a class of his own. Arguably no other notable figure in history was so fantastically wrong about nearly every important thing he had to say. But, luckily for him, academics have been — and still are — infinitely creative in their efforts to whitewash his errors, even as lay readers grow increasingly dumbfounded by the entire mess.
So what can we see today that we didn’t see during the last century? We now know that Freud compulsively fudged the historical record. This tendency is evident in Freud’s backsliding statements on his advocacy of cocaine, his opportunism concerning the case of Anna O., his flip-flops on the seduction theory, and in almost every instance where he mentions a patient.
Just ask the “Wolf Man,” Sergius Pankejeff, whom Freud supposedly cured but who was, in truth, consigned to psychoanalysis for an additional 60 years. Not surprising, Pankejeff considered Freud’s effect on his life a “catastrophe.”
We also know that Freud never seriously dealt with the problem of “suggestion,” which totally compromised his clinical findings and, by extension, his theories. Already, by the 1890s, few believed in Freud’s convenient claim that suggestion — the undue influence of the psychoanalyst over the patient — was possible only in the biologically predisposed and was thus of no consequence to his findings. Amazingly, these critical insights were buried under Freud’s rhetoric of denial and by his growing fame. Now we’ve come full circle. Today we know better than to trust in memories, or in free associations, that supposedly issue from the “therapeutic alliance” between analyst and patient.
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