Allen Esterson

Growing up in the 1950s, I heard, of course, of Sigmund Freud. I had a vague idea of what “mental illness” meant, and had an equally vague idea that you cured it by lying on a couch and talking about your childhood. As I matured into the early 1960s I picked up still more vague ideas about “castration anxiety”, “penis envy”, and “Oedipus complex”. I took all these things on faith; they were scientific, after all, just as much a part of medicine as – for example – vaccination. Somewhere down the line, however, I ran across an astounding statement – I don’t remember the source, and this is a paraphrase: “Freudian psychiatry is unfalsifiable – there is no imaginable human behavior that it cannot explain – and therefore it is unscientific”. That was quite shocking – as much as if somebody had suggested the germ theory of disease was wrong – so I did what came naturally and started a reading program and worked through a series of books on Freud; the most recent being Seductive Mirage, by Allen Esterson.


This isn’t a terribly engaging read, unfortunately. Esterson is a “Lecturer in Mathematics” at Southwark College, which possibly makes him a strange author for the biography of a psychiatrist. However, he takes on Freud with scholarly thoroughness – almost soporifically thorough at times. Everything had multiple references and documentation, and it’s pretty damning. Esterson contends, with extensive evidence, that Freud falsified reports on patients, claiming cures that didn’t happen and even inventing fictional cases that psychoanalysis supposedly brought to triumphant termination. Freud’ s supposed “scientific” discoveries about the human mind were actually based on rhetoric and logical fallacies, with many of the classic trappings of pseudoscience – only a trained psychoanalyst could reveal the truths of psychoanalysis, and you couldn’t be a trained psychoanalyst unless you accepted the truths of psychoanalysis. Like many pseudoscientists Freud delighted in portraying himself as persecuted by enemies – said enemies being anyone who disagreed with him on the slightest detail. In fact, Freud’s insertion of sexual content into everything – every boy suffered from castration anxiety and an Oedipus complex, and every girl from penis envy, and every mental illness (and Freud was quick to insist that many physical illnesses – allergies and asthma, for example – were actually psychological) was a result of the boy or girl failing to suitably repress their castration anxiety or penis envy on the way to adulthood. Esterson cites a particularly egregious example of Freud dismissing a female analyst with the comment that she had the unrealizable ambition to have a penis – apparently every woman in a “masculine” profession was suffering from penis envy.


Following the same line, every dream was actually about sex – for example, Freud triumphantly exposes a girl’s dream of flowers on a table as evidence of her subconscious desire to be deflowered, and “proves” it by noting that the flowers included carnations, which implied carnal desire. Of course, if convenient, anything could actually mean its opposite – in one famous case Freud majestically decides that a woman’s disgust with an older man who tried to seduce her means she is actually in love with him, and her repeated dismissals of the idea are confirmation. He notes that she eventually stopped making these complaints – with the implication that she had accepted the idea. Esterson discloses that she actually just terminated the “treatment”.


What’s missing here, unfortunately, is a wider study of the implications of Freudian theory on society. Esterson cites a relatively recent book by a former curator of the Freud archives: The Assault on Truth – Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory. Early in his career, Freud decided that mental illness was caused by repressed memories of sexual molestation as a child (he later abandoned this idea as untenable – but Esterson notes he stuck to part of it; mental illness could be caused by imagining you were sexually molested as a child). The Assault on Truth argues that Freud abandoned the childhood seduction theory not because it was wrong but because he feared the controversy that would result if he “exposed” numerous parents as child molesters after psychoanalyzing their children. Of course, belief in widespread sexual molestation of children is the keystone of the “repressed memory” movement and having Freud as patron saint – even a “lapsed” one – adds credence to the idea. However, Esterson doesn’t go as far as directly attributing the modern “repressed memory” idea to Freud. There’s also no discussion of Freud’s influence on art and literature – perhaps Esterson realizes there’s a whole other book there.


Another missing element is why Freud was so popular (in contrast to his own repeated claims that he was persecuted and ignored). Esterson repeatedly notes that Freud was a excellent lecturer and writer. I can speak to the lecturing ability, but Freud’s writings (at least, as quoted by Esterson) don’t seem that brilliant. Admittedly, Esterson is deliberately looking for examples of Freud using faulty logic. I imagine the fundamental reason for acceptance of Freudianism is that it seemed slightly naughty to lay on a couch and talk about your adolescent and preadolescent sexual experiences.


A worthwhile if strenuous read. Extensively referenced; no illustrations (although I’m not sure exactly how you would illustrate castration anxiety anyway). I will continue to search for books about Freud’s influence on 20th century culture and society.… (altro)