The May 2004 issue of Scientific American carries an article
on Freud and some recent research in neuroscience with the title “Freud Returns”. Below are some comments on the
article by Allen Esterson.
I never cease to be astonished at the confidence with which erroneous
assertions about Freud are made in articles such as “Freud Returns” in the May 2004 issue of Scientific American,
written by Mark Solms, psychoanalyst and neuroscientist. For instance, Solms writes: “When Freud introduced the central
notion that most mental processes that determine our everyday thoughts, feelings and volitions occur unconsciously, his contemporaries
rejected it as impossible.” This piece of psychoanalytic mythology has been shown to be false by historians of psychology
since the 1960s and 1970s, yet it is still being propagated in popular articles by pro-Freud writers like Solms. Schopenhauer
had posited something akin to the notion Solms ascribes to Freud before the latter was born. Francis Galton, writing in Brain
in 1879-1880, described the mind as analogous to a house beneath which is “a complex system of drains and gas and water-pipes…which
are usually hidden out of sight, and of whose existence, so long as they act well, we never trouble ourselves.” He went
on to discuss “the existence of still deeper strata of mental operations, sunk wholly below the level of consciousness,
which may account for such phenomena as cannot otherwise be explained.” (Incidentally, Freud subscribed to Brain at
that time.) The historian of psychology, Mark Altschule, wrote in 1977: “It is difficult - or perhaps impossible - to
find a nineteenth century psychologist or medical psychologist who did not recognize unconscious cerebration as not only real
but of the highest importance.”
Solms cites the cognitive neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel among an
increasing number of neuroscientists who are reaching the conclusion that the current model of the mind as revealed by neuroscience
“is not unlike the one that Freud outlined a century ago.” Is this the same Eric R. Kandel who wrote in 1999 that
“the neural basis for a set of unconscious mental processes” provided by current discoveries in neuroscience “bears
no resemblances to Freud’s unconscious”? Kandel continues: “[This unconscious] is not related to instinctual
strivings or to sexual conflicts, and the information never enters consciousness. These sets of findings provide the first
challenge to a psychoanalytically oriented neural science.” (Am. J. Psychiatry, 155:4, p. 468) (Solms implicitly alludes
to the title of this very article [“A new intellectual framework for psychiatry”] when he cites Kandel a second
time later in Scientific American piece!)
That Solms is well-versed in Freudian mythologies, but ignorant of
the facts that have been documented to refute them, is confirmed by his writing that when Freud argued for the existence of
“primitive animal drives” in humans his ideas were received with “moral outrage” by his Victorian
contemporaries. This account purporting to give an overall picture of the situation at that time has been refuted so many
times by scholars who have researched the period that one despairs that the actual facts will ever penetrate the hermetically
sealed world of psychoanalytic traditionalists.
Solms presents (in the usual imprecise fashion of such descriptions)
Freud’s notions of the id and ego as having correlates in current brain research. But, as the British psychologist William
McDougall pointed out seventy years ago, the notion expressed by Freud that the ego stands for reason and circumspection and
the id stands for the untamed passions goes back to “Plato’s doctrine of Reason as the charioteer who guides the
fierce unruly horses, the passions, which are the motive powers.” Sometimes it seems that there is almost no psychological
insight in the history of the human race that Freudians do not ascribe to Freud.
Supposedly in support of Freud’s notions of infantile development
(highly bowdlerised, as is the nature of such presentations) Solms writes that one would be hard-pressed to find a developmental
neurobiologist “who does not agree that early experiences, especially between mother and infant, influence the pattern
of brain connections in ways that fundamentally shape our future personality and mental health.” There are several comments
one might make in regard to this statement. How could it be otherwise than that life experiences influence the pattern of
brain connections in a baby, growing into infancy, in a way that is crucial to the future development of the brain? The idea
that we owe the origination of such notions to Freud, or that to accept them is to credit Freud’s highly specific notions
of infantile psychosexual development, is absurd. Whether it can be said that such experiences “shape” the future
personality and mental health partly depends on what precisely is meant by the word “shape” in this context. That
they have considerable influence on the future personality and future mental health of the individual is without doubt the
case, but the extent to which they are a determining factor is a matter of dispute.
Solms writes at this point that “It is becoming increasingly
clear that a good deal of our mental activity is unconsciously motivated.” Yes, indeed, as has been implicit in the
writings of Rochefoucauld, Montaigne, Trollope, Austen, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, and so on, and explicitly
spelled out by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche well before Freud wrote about this notion. The only remarkable thing about this
passage in Solms’s article is that he is so determined to credit Freud with this commonplace.
Solms writes of a “basic mammalian instinctual circuit”
recently discovered in the brain that it is a “seeking system” which “bears a remarkable resemblance to
the Freudian ‘libido’.” He later refers to a statement by the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp in an article
in Newsweek (11 November 2002), and it happens that this very article provides more details of the “libido” claim.
It reports some recent experimental research by Panksepp on the ventraltegmental area of the cortex of the brain. The author
of the article, Fred Guterl, writes:
“When Panksepp stimulated the corresponding region in a mouse, the animal
would sniff the air and walk around, as though it were looking for something… The brain tissue seemed to cause a general
desire for something new. ‘What I was seeing,’ he says, ‘was the urge to do stuff.’ Panksepp called
this seeking. To Mark Solms of University College in London, that sounds very much like libido. ‘Freud needed some sort
of general, appetitive desire to seek pleasure in the world of objects,’ says Solms. ‘Panksepp discovered as a
neuroscientist what Freud discovered psychologically’.”
Note the steps in this argument. A neuroscientist discovers a region
in a mouse’s brain which, when stimulated, causes it to walk around as if it is seeking something, described by the
neuroscientist as an “urge to do stuff”. Solms associates this directly with Freud’s “libido”
concept, and proclaims the new research as the neuroscientific correlate of Freud’s psychological ‘discovery’.
And then in Scientific American he unequivocally calls the “seeking” brain circuitry the “neural equivalent”
of Freud’s libido. What nonsense! We didn’t need Freud to tell us that human beings have an innate propensity
to explore the world, and to endeavour to intensify their sensual and emotional experiences. That Solms is at pains to identify
this basic behavioural characteristic of many mammals with Freud’s ill-defined, highly elastic concept of “libido”
tells us more about his devotion to Freud than about the subject matter in question. Such is the sycophantic attitude that
many such magazines in the United States still retain towards Freud, the “Newsweek” report on Panksepp’s
research on a mouse’s brain was titled “What Freud Got Right”!
On the theme of “what Freud got right”, Solms cites the
notion supported by brain research that dream content has a “primary emotional mechanism”. But more accurately
he should have said that this is what Charcot, Janet, and Krafft-Ebing got right, because, as the Freud scholar Rosemarie
Sand has documented, such a view of the content of dreams was postulated by these psychologists (among several others) before
Freud wrote a word on the subject. This includes Krafft-Ebing’s view that unconscious sexual wishes could be detected
in dreams, i.e., essentially the wish-fulfillment theory of dreams, alluded to in his article, that Solms is itching to claim
as another triumph for Freud - if (and it’s a big if, in the view of the dream researcher J. Allan Hobson), an hypothesis
he has put forward concerning the results of recent dream research and their interpretation, is correct. As Hobson has argued,
Solms’s broad assertions that imply that current brain research validates the specific content of Freud’s theories
of dreaming and dream analysis do not withstand close examination.
I could go on, but I’ll conclude with Solms’s statement
that “Today treatments that integrate psychotherapy with psychoactive medications are widely recognized as the best
approach to brain disorders.” What he doesn’t say is that, in the UK at least (and Solms until very recently resided
there), it is widely recognized that the most effective form of psychotherapy for this purpose is cognitive and behavioural
therapy, not psychodynamic therapies that are based on Freudian concepts. That he then attempts to associate the aforementioned
“psychotherapy” with (by implication, psychoanalytic-style) “talk therapy”, and thence to “brain
imaging”, is more than a trifle disingenuous. For Solms, it seems, all roads lead to Freud, and one gains the impression
that whatever the results of current brain research he will continue to write articles seeking to show they are “consistent
with” some or other contention of the Master.
Allen Esterson is the author of Seductive Mirage: An Exploration
of the Work of Sigmund Freud
allenesterson@compuserve.com
http://www.human-nature.com/esterson/index.html
