Scapegoating Sigmund : FREUDIAN FRAUD: The Malignant Effect of Freud’s Theory on American Thought and Culture <i> By E. Fuller Torrey MD (HarperCollins: $25; 362 pp.) </i>

There is an old joke about one antisemite who complains to another that their troubles are “all the fault of the shoemakers and the Jews.” “But why the shoemakers?” asks his friend. “Why the Jews?” he shrugs, as if there had to be a reason. And so with poor Freud in this new book by dissident psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey. Very few evils of modern American culture are not his fault.

Freud’s original sin, Torrey believes, was to argue that early childhood experiences, especially those of a sexual nature, are “crucial determinants of adult personality.” This makes him a proponent of “nurture” in the nature-vs.-nurture controversy, of the notion, in other words, that family, culture and society exert a greater influence over human personality than genetically acquired traits. As Torrey sees it, this puts Freud in the theoretical company of every sort of social reformer, from liberals and communists to sexual libertines and perverts. After all, they are only versions of one another anyway.

Torrey believes, for instance, that Freud married sexual freedom and social reform in America in the person of Emma Goldman, the 19th-Century anarchist and advocate of free love. (“The bride,” notes Torrey, “wore red.”) In truth, Goldman, whom Torrey describes as “the most infamous woman in America,” embraced Freud’s views on the importance of sexuality in human life but resoundingly rejected his poignantly gloomy belief that creativity, conscience and civilization depended on its repression.

Indeed, almost every liberal sin--so characterized by Torrey--is laid at Freud’s door: the belief that social, educational, economic or even psychotherapeutic interventions might make a difference; Dr. Spock and permissive child-raising; Willie Horton--yes, Willie Horton, because he exemplifies Massachusetts’ misguided commitment to the psychotherapeutic treatment of prisoners; the entire Kennedy/Johnson War on Poverty, which can be seen as a mental-health program dominated by the likes of Michael Harrington--an “ex-Trotskyist and union organizer” who admitted that he had read Freud and lived in New York, where his friends “had been, or were being analyzed.”

Torrey concedes that Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty was one of the most humane and perhaps effective government programs ever, but notes that its success came “in spite of and not because of Freudian theory.” An entire appendix purports to show how Freudian ideology insidiously infiltrated the American intelligentsia with “liberal political beliefs.”

After World War II, Torrey believes, the Freudians swept everything before them, dominating the universities, Hollywood and the New Yorker magazine and thereby encouraging self-destructive behavior, from permissive child-rearing to the abandonment of the concept of personal responsibility. (Torrey is forced to concede, however, that only eight of the 21 “intellectual elite” he surveys in the appendix are real Freudians, a category which he has stretched to include such well-known “liberals” as Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol.)

Supposedly, Freud also was the main intellectual influence on anthropologists Franz Boas, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict in their battles against racism and all that it implied in America, from forced sterilizations to exclusionary immigration policies. Although Torrey expresses clear opposition to racism, he impugns the scholarship of anti-racists through personal attacks: Benedict was a lesbian, Mead was a bisexual who left her husband and did not spend much time with her daughter, Boas was a leftie who barely escaped deportation in the early 1920s. Once again, “supporters of nurture were associated with sexual as well as political liberalism.” Why isn’t all this also the fault of the shoemakers?

Throughout “Freudian Fraud,” Torrey also goes after the doctor directly: His ideas were derivative, he took drugs as a young man, he once believed that specific “genital spots” could be found in the nose, and he expressed a mild interest in the occult. And of course, his theories are scientifically unproven. How, one wonders, did such a reprobate produce one of the master narratives of our time?

Silliness abounds in these pages. In 1927, for example, President Woodrow Wilson is said to have persuaded Henry Ford to give up his campaign against Jews: from the grave, one presumes, since Wilson died in 1924. But much more problematic is Torrey’s attempt to associate Freud with nurture by portraying every conceivable intellectual development in which Freud played any role as a blow against nature.

In fact, Freud’s emphasis on the importance of nature was steadfast. His dictum that “anatomy is destiny,” for instance, made him a great enemy of feminists. He did acknowledge that nurture played a role in shaping little boys and girls--born with all manner of desires--into men and women ready, willing and able to engage in heterosexual procreation. And a whole school of French feminism has sought to disassociate the penis as an organ from the phallus as a symbol of authority so that everyone can have one. Freud’s major popular legacy, nevertheless, has always leaned much more toward nature than nurture.

When Benjamin Spock--a decent enough fellow, Torrey says, until he was corrupted by the liberal politics and psychoanalysis of his first wife--wrote “Baby and Child Care,” he was not ushering in a new movement to indoctrinate innocent infants. The Bible says that as the twig is bent so shall it grow, and all child-rearing advice since the Greeks is predicated on the belief that what one does in bringing up one’s children makes a difference. No, Spock replaced the likes of John B. Watson, who believed as many obstacles as possible should be put in children’s way as they played so that they would learn to overcome adversity, or Dr. D. G .M. Schreber, who warned never to bathe a child in warm water and prescribed harnesses and horrific stretching devices to maintain proper posture.

Torrey’s case against American anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead is similarly skewed. “Theories emphasizing genetic aspects of behavior,” he laments, “were nowhere to be seen in the postwar period, and with a clear field it was easy for theories of culture and early childhood experiences to establish themselves as truth.” Theories emphasizing genetics, however, were popular only in the most overtly racist circles; Mead and Benedict were merely reflecting a new interest in studying cultural differences brought on by the realization that Western culture was not intrinsically superior to all others.

Far from being a co-conspirator of these anthropologists, Freud was an arch-bourgeois European who hated Americans for what he perceived as their savagery and had little interest in or sympathy for South Sea islanders studied by Mead. True, Freud’s discussions of the psychic pain of repression certainly influenced the more Utopian moments of Mead and Benedict. But Torrey’s suggestion that Freud’s emphasis on nurture led these anthropologists to ignore the possible influence of nature is absurd: No one would argue that genetic differences explain why coming-of-age ceremonies require boys to have sex with male relatives in the New Guinea Highlands but not in Los Angeles.

Torrey’s current preoccupation with genetic influences on human behavior represents an abrupt shift from his 1974 book, “The Death of Psychiatry.” There, Torrey blasted Freud for having succumbed--understandably, but regrettably--to medical psychiatry. Freud was indoctrinated by his two most influential teachers, Torrey charged, who thought that only physical and chemical forces are active in organisms and that depression is simply the result of the overflow of blood to the brain. The 1974 Torrey actually downplayed the importance of nature, suggesting that “a neo-educational model, complete with behavioral science and tutors,” be employed to treat mental disorders.

Until the very end of “Freudian Fraud,” it is easy to see this book as yet another neo-conservative blast against homosexuals, women, cultural relativism, liberalism and the like. But then Torrey offers a final audit of Freud in America. On the positive side are listed his contributions to humanistic and egalitarian thought in America, his importance in the development of counseling and psychotherapy (how this ends up on Torrey’s credit ledger is mysterious) and his popularization of dreams and the unconscious. On the debit side are listed irresponsibility, the denigration of women, narcissism and personal-growth institutes such as Esalen. (How so uptight a gentleman as Freud gets listed as the “core” influence on such centers is another of this book’s unexplained mysteries). So, Torrey is not the ordinary neo-con. Where, then, does he stand?

The key, perhaps, lies not in the book at all but in the publisher’s biography of Torrey. Torrey has completely rejected his earlier views and is now a major figure in mental-health-advocacy groups that argue for treating schizophrenia, bipolar disorders and the like as “real” diseases that can be treated pharmacologically and studied as one would cancer and diabetes and not as exaggerated neuroses caused by some failure in parenting.

Here of course he has an important point. American psychiatry has not been wholeheartedly on the side of culture in the treatment it has proffered: 40,000 lobotomies and countless electroshocks cannot be laid at Freud’s feet. But the profession certainly has been slow in many instances to recognize that some disorders do not yield to the talking cure. Having no interest in such conditions, Freud did indeed influence subsequent generations to blame dysfunctional families rather than dysfunctional brains for psychosis.

It is ironic that this truly important point is there only by implication. It could and should be made, explicitly, by someone as expert on serious mental illnesses as is Dr. Torrey, without the tendentious, paranoid bashing of culture, liberalism, women, alternative sexualities and much more wherever they appear. He need not blame Freud, or the shoemakers, for everything and nothing.