The movement that Freud and others built together, people like Carl Jung, became a dominant force in the 20th century. By the middle of the 20th century it was common for people to spend huge amounts of time and money getting psychoanalyzed, and often with, perhaps, not incredibly impressive results. It was a little bit of a priesthood so to speak of people who controlled the psychoanalytic movement, difficult to challenge it, difficult to ask questions about it. When somebody challenged it, they'd be accused of one or another kind of repression and resistance and so on. There has been in the last quarter century, a fairly radical departure away from the psychoanalytic movement, provoked in part by, for example, Adolf Grunbaum's 1984 book, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis. People have come to challenge that theory and asked whether it's something that really is supported by the evidence that it claims to be. Freud also would not make friends with very many feminists because feminists have found that Freud made a lot of claims that tended to belittle women and tend to focus on things like male genitalia. So, there are plenty of reasons for being skeptical of his theory along those lines. But I should also say that contemporary talk therapy, for example, cognitive behavioral therapy, various of its cousins, still has a fairly large role to play. Recent work on trying to determine the efficacy of talk therapy has in the last decade provided increasingly, never dramatically, but increasingly better support for the value of talk therapy. So, if we think of contemporary psychotherapy as being an heir among other things to the psychoanalytical movement, we'd want to say, I think, that's something that benefits from its legacy as long as it moves away from some of the specific claims about, for example, the Oedipal Complex or symbolism in dreams, that can be detached from the rest of the idea that there are perhaps unconscious desires that activate our behavior. So, talk therapy is something that allows us to see that the Freudian legacy should not allow us to just throw the baby out the bathwater and reject everything about the Freudian approach, just be picky, and decide which things are worth keeping. Tim Wilson writes, "The psychoanalytic narrative is attractive because it explains so much." That's a provocative claim, partly because when he talks about explaining that suggests that, at least as we normally use the word �explain�, that suggests that psychoanalytic theory, in fact, accurately accounts for a wide range of behavior. But I don't think that's quite what Wilson means. That is perhaps not quite what he'd wanted to say, rather what I think is the more plausible claim is that psychoanalytic theory purports to account for a wide range of phenomena. The question is whether it succeeds in doing so. So, that's something that is a live question. But, in spite of the fact that it seems to be a live question, there has been a fairly dramatic shift away from the psychoanalytic movement in the last quarter century. So, for example Frederick Crews in The New York Review of Books in the course of reviewing a number of recent books about Freud and his legacy writes the following, "That psychoanalysis as a mode of treatment has been experiencing a long institutional decline is no longer in serious dispute. Nor is the reason: though some patients claimed to have acquired profound self-insight and even alterations of personality, in the aggregate psychoanalysis has proved to be an indifferently successful and vastly inefficient method of removing neurotic symptoms. It's also the method that is least likely to be 'over when it's over'. The experience of undergoing an intensive analysis may have genuine value as a form of extended meditation, but it seems to produce a good many more converts than cures. Indeed, among the dwindling number of practicing analysts, many have now backed away from any medical claims for a treatment that was once touted as the only lasting remedy for the entire spectrum of disorders this side of psychosis. Freud's doctrine has been faring no better, in scientifically serious quarters, as a cluster of propositions about the mind. Without significant experimental or epidemiological support for any of its notions, psychoanalysis has simply been left behind by mainstream psychological research." Again, that's Frederick Crews. Now, Frederick Crews is, in the whole, right, it seems to me, correct in his assessment of the current state of psychoanalytic theory. But, I suspect there is still a danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater in the following sense. Just because we have failed to find adequate empirical support for a theory about the nature of the unconscious mind, so it does not mean that the theory, that set of claims, is not true. It seems to me a better response will just be to remain agnostic. Maybe it's the case that whenever there is a pistol or a dagger, a spear that occurs in somebody's dream, that represents male genitalia. That may be true, but it's something that we need to just do further investigation of in order to determine whether it's true. The fact that Freud and his followers didn't succeed in establishing that it was doesn't show that it's false. It just leaves it, it's still open question. Firstly and secondly, I think many of us would agree, at least in our own experience that we often have dreams that are not just random collocations of experiences from the previous day or days, but rather, in some cases, dreams seemed to be trying in some sense to be sending us a message. So, I'm sure you've had an experience of a dream that seems to be an anxiety dream, like if you're a student, you've probably had dreams in which you are finding yourself in an exam that you're completely unprepared for, or you might have a dream the night before your scheduled to give a speech, in which there you are up in front of the audience and you've got no clothes on, or if you're a new parent, then you might have a dream where something terrible happens to your newborn child, perhaps you lose control of the stroller as a vicious dog jumps in and kills the baby inside of it, something of that kind. Freud says, that all of those, what we refer to now as anxiety dreams, are examples of wish fulfillment. That is to say, presumably, that the reason why you have a dream as a new parent of your baby being killed by a fierce dog is that perhaps the baby is getting in the way of the sexual relationship that you had with your partner up until the baby was born, and if that's the case, it might be that you have some kind of wish to get rid of that baby since you can go back to the way things were before. You might accept that, you might not. If you have a dream about the anxiety that you feel as a student that somehow represents that anxiety, maybe Freud was right to say that what you really would like to do is to break the bounds of civilized society, forget about this degree that you're working towards and go run amok and get involved in as much violence as possible, perhaps. But another possibility is that those dreams, those that we now refer to as anxiety dreams are ways of preparing yourself, girding yourself for the various challenges that are ahead. Before giving a speech, make sure your pants are buttoned. When taking the baby outside, your unconscious mind, perhaps, it's telling you, "Be careful with potentially dangerous animals that might be ready to attack it." When you are about to take a class, make sure you remember that you are enrolled in it by the time the exam rolls around and be ready for it. These ways of girding ourselves with potentially challenging experiences is another explanation as to why these dreams have the shape that they do. These are empirical questions that, it seems to me, can be investigated by means of trials of various kinds. So, what Fred Crews says to the following effect that, Freud, psychoanalytic movement that he helped start is an interesting blip in the history of thought about the mind and it dominated much of 20th century work in therapy, as well as much theorizing, but it's something that we should put behind us as a chapter that's pretty much closed. I believe that's a bit of an overreaction. It seems to me, there are many of Freud's themes that are worth investigating today, partly because if they're right, if they're plausible, then they matter, the things that we should know about. So, the fact that he and his followers didn't succeed in establishing a great many of their empirical claims about the subconscious and preconscious mind doesn't quite show that those claims aren't true but rather leaves them as an open question. We'll move on to our next class is precisely that general line of inquiry. That is to say, if we could take a contemporary look at the unconscious mind and try to investigate it in a rigorous empirical way, what would we find? I'll see you soon!
