Freud Slips as an Icon of Science

No scientific figure has permeated the American consciousness--and perhaps its unconscious--more than Sigmund Freud.

From Freudian slips to defense mechanisms to the cigars he made more notorious than Monica Lewinsky ever could, Freud’s ideas are everywhere.

They’ve shaped the way we see the mind, altered the way we interpret literature and brought talk therapy to the world at large. They’ve also leaked far outside academic circles, infiltrating the work of Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen and even “The Simpsons.”

But there’s a slight problem. Unlike Einstein and Darwin, whose groundbreaking ideas have survived for decades, the emerging consensus among scientists, including psychiatrists, about Freud is that he was wrong. About almost everything.

Penis envy hasn’t fared well. Ditto for castration anxiety, latent homosexuality and Oedipal complexes as deep motivating factors in behavior.

The list goes on: Freud’s understanding of women’s sexuality has been eviscerated by feminists. And the notion that dreams are a “royal road” to the unconscious has been largely put to rest by research on rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep.

“The scientific literature is clear,” said Frank Sulloway, author of “Freud: Biologist of the Mind” and visiting professor in the department of psychology at UC Berkeley. “Freud was wrong in almost every important respect.”

Although many psychoanalysts argue that updated versions of Freud’s thinking are still relevant to understanding--and aiding--the human mind today, Freud’s legacy has largely migrated from the scientific realm to the cultural. Today his texts are more likely to be read in English departments than in medical schools.

Michael Roth, curator of an exhibit on Freud now at the Skirball Cultural Center in the Sepulveda Pass, thinks Freud’s allure may stem simply from the topics he chose to address.

There’s sex. Aggression. Sex. Childhood fantasies. Sex. Traumatic events. Sex. Inner needs. Sex. Dreams. Oh, and sex.

All the anxiety and conflict over Freud seem to have manifested themselves in a battle between Freudians and doubters that long delayed the opening of the exhibit. It was an Oedipal clash of egos and superegos; and id ain’t over yet.

The exhibit--which runs through July 25--focuses largely on Freud’s cultural influence and says almost nothing about science.

It’s not likely that Freud would have been flattered by his very American incorporation into the cultural mainstream. The good Viennese doctor pops up in “The Flintstones,” “Popeye,” even “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” In one “Simpsons” episode, Homer suggests that Marge should repress her anxieties, “so she’ll never annoy us again.”

But “Freud started in science. He was 100% identified in science. That’s what he cared about,” Sulloway said. “If all [that proponents] can salvage is his cultural influence, it’s actually pretty tragic.”

It’s not only Freud’s theories that have taken a hit. The man himself has been battered by a slew of critics--so many that they are referred to as a “Freud industry.” They have unearthed verrrry interesting evidence suggesting that Freud had an affair with his sister-in-law, arranged amorous affairs for one of his patients, abused cocaine, denied a patient’s valid claim of childhood sexual abuse, and napped and wrote correspondence during therapeutic sessions with patients.

Freud’s proudest legacy--psychoanalysis--hasn’t done much better. Psychoanalysis, which can be a years-long, four-day-a-week process that seeks to unveil how dreams, the past and a person’s unconscious thoughts shape current behavior, is under siege. It’s been largely replaced by antidepressants and shorter, less costly forms of treatment such as short-term psychotherapy.

“Psychoanalysis,” said Edward Shorter, a University of Toronto historian of medicine, is “a dinosaur ideology of the 19th century staggering toward the tar pit.” Yet like much else in the tangled story of Freud legend, psychoanalysis remains an area of vicious debate.

Proponents, including many patients, say it can offer great and lasting help. Critics such as Shorter say the field has been responsible for the suicides of many severely mentally ill patients who required medication and hospitalization more than sessions on the couch.

Freud Still Stirs Passions

So if Freud was so wrong, if his methods remain dubious and if he was a poor and possibly unethical practitioner, we are left with a most Freudian question: Why is he so irrepressible?

Despite his having been proclaimed dead dozens of times since his actual death in 1939, Freud continues to inflame, inspire and provoke intellectual schisms that border on open warfare.

Consider the history of the current exhibit at the Skirball.

Conceived by the Library of Congress in 1993, “Freud: Conflict and Culture” was nearly stopped in its tracks, and its Washington, D.C., debut was delayed five years. Its foremost enemy was Freud critic Peter Swales, who circulated a petition of protest.

Swales, a onetime Rolling Stones concert promoter who started a second career by unearthing unsavory details of Freud’s personal life, complained that the exhibit would be a “Freudfest”--a chance for the doctor’s thinning ranks of psychoanalytical disciples to dust off his fading legacy.

At the time, another Freud critic, Frederick Crews, a retired UC Berkeley professor of English, said the motive behind the exhibit “was to polish up the tarnished image of a business that’s heading into Chapter 11.”

The psychoanalytic community, led by the Long Island psychoanalyst who is director of the Freud archives, Dr. Harold Blum, responded with a classically Freudian argument: Critics were unconsciously resisting the truth because Freud’s ideas were too threatening.

In analyzing the critics, the Freudians did have plenty of ammunition. Swales once longed to be director of the Freud archives. And, like a vocal ex-smoker, Crews spent years in training to become a psychoanalyst before vehemently renouncing the field.

Even nuanced personal details became cannon fodder. Roth, the exhibit’s curator, was suspect simply because the father of his ex-wife is a noted Freud critic.

“The level of nastiness, even for academia, is pretty extreme, “ said Roth, assistant director of the Getty Research Institute.

‘Even Critics Psychoanalyze Freud’

To his proponents, Freud’s ideas--a way to look at inner desires and hidden motivation--are so important and commonplace that they are taken for granted.

“Even the critics psychoanalyze Freud, which is an ironic homage,” said James Hansell, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst on the faculty of the University of Michigan and the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute.

Many psychoanalysts argue that, although many of Freud’s theories have foundered, no one else has come close to providing answers about human nature that are as satisfying.

The steady stream of scientific findings emerging from the labs of neuroscientists--from imaging machines flickering with pictures of the brain at work to the understanding of subtle chemicals that whisper messages across neurons--has done little to provide a full understanding of human nature.

Some of those findings are disturbing, particularly the idea that our inner selves can be boiled down to a chemical recipe that can be tweaked and improved with pinches of lithium salts and dashes of serotonin blockers. Today’s reductionist, biological, Prozac-laden approach to the mind offers limited understanding, Hansell said.

“The violence, the political scandal we see--all those things seem to cry out for a deeper explanation,” he said. “We don’t seem to have the tools to deal with it without in-depth psychology, including psychoanalysis.”

For Roth, Freud’s answers may be suspect, but the questions he asked--about what we do and why we do it--continue to fascinate.

Nevertheless, even Freud’s broad cultural reach may be shrinking. In World War II-era films such as Hitchcock’s “Spellbound,” psychoanalysts were often portrayed as imposing, scholarly figures. Since then, portrayals of analysts in film and television have become more comic, and sometimes mocking.

The “Frasier”-filled ‘90s “might represent the era of the cinema’s greatest ridicule of the therapist,” said Ann E. Kaplan, an English professor at the State University of New York at Stonybrook and expert on psychoanalysis and film, in an essay that accompanies the Skirball exhibit.

Even the New Yorker, long the home of cartoons with a psychoanalytic bent, has depicted a practitioner holding this humbling sign: “Will Psychoanalyze for Food.”

Freudian references that do emerge today must compete with rival psychopharmacological visions. Take two Oscar-nominated motion pictures from 1997.

“Good Will Hunting” is a classic neo-Freudian tale, in which Matt Damon’s character works with analyst Robin Williams, sees his life in a new way and, said Roth, “gets a pretty girlfriend.”

In “As Good as It Gets,” though, Jack Nicholson’s obsessive-compulsive character is decidedly post-Freudian as he turns to pharmaceutical help. Roth said the message is: “Take your medicine and you get a pretty girlfriend.”

Which vision will rule the future? Roth’s 13-year-old son may be as good a harbinger as any. He’s never made a Freudian joke, reported his father. Yet he frequently spouts lines like: “Did you forget your medication today?”

Perhaps more ominous to keepers of the Freudian flame is that so much of the controversy that surrounded Freud and the exhibit in the early ‘90s has ebbed in the last couple of years. As the exhibit traveled from Washington to New York, Vienna and Los Angeles, it inspired little of the furor that Freudians have long claimed as proof of Freud’s continued importance.

His biographer, Sulloway, has moved on to his own work extending Darwin’s ideas to examine how personalities form.

After giving a few lectures on Freud to celebrate the opening of the exhibit here, Roth has returned to his main focus, examining how society interprets the past. He will soon become head of the Bay Area’s California College of Arts and Crafts.

Even longtime Freud critic Crews has unlaced his boxing gloves. When contacted for this article, he said: “I don’t want to talk about Freud. It’s just so fruitless at this point.”

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Freud Meets the Modern World

Some of Freudian concepts and their current counterparts:

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Compiled by MALOY MOORE / Los Angeles Times

Sources: World Book Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, Time magazine, Frank Sulloway.