Chapter 5
PSEUDOPSYCHOLOGY
Founded by Sigmund Freud in Vienna in the late 1800s, psychoanalysis has had enormous influence on Western culture. For most people, Freud and psychoanalysis are synonymous with psychology. Psychoanalytic approaches have been applied to such widely diverse fields as history and political science, literature, music, and the arts. Nonetheless, psychoanalysis is based in large part on pseudoscientific formulations that are inherently unfalsifiable. This unfalsifiability accounts for the popularity of psychoanalytic “explanations” in many fields. In some instances, psychoanalytic theory does make testable predictions; these predictions have usually been found to be incorrect. The next section will summarize the major components of Freud’s theories.
FREUDIAN THEORY
One major aspect of Freud’s theory was his division of the mind into three levels of consciousness. First, there was the conscious level; below this lay the preconscious, equivalent to a mental library and storing most of our memories. Freud believed these memories were available to consciousness, so the preconscious would thus correspond to what modern psychologists call long-term memory. Below the preconscious lay the unconscious. Freud believed this contained memories, desires, and feelings that had been repressed by the individual because they were too traumatic or painful to face directly. For example, Freud believed that all children go through a period when they have sexual desires for the parent of the opposite sex. He termed this the Oedipus complex. Since these incestuous desires would be considered perverted by most societies, they were repressed. Castration anxiety, discussed below, also resulted in the repression of the Oedipal feelings. Highly traumatic events that took place in childhood or adulthood could also be repressed and relegated to the unconscious, because memories of these events would be too painful to face directly. Material in the unconscious was not available to consciousness, but could still exert powerful influences on behavior. Thus, the repressed memory of some childhood trauma could result in severe psychological difficulties later in life, even though the patient would deny that the actual trauma had ever taken place.
Freud’s theory also deals in great detail with the development of personality and specifically with the development of sexual behavior and sexual identity. Freud divided this development into four stages. In some of these stages there were specific “complexes” that had to be overcome if the developmental process was to proceed normally. The first of these is the oral stage, where the infant focuses on the pleasure received from oral stimulation. The second, the anal stage, appears when the child is about two. Here pleasure is said to be obtained largely by “withholding or expelling feces” (Hilgard, Atkinson, and Atkinson 1979, p. 391). The next stage is the phallic stage (about ages three to six), where pleasure is derived from the fondling of one’s own genitals. Finally, as adolescence is reached, one enters the genital stage, where sexual desires are directed to others.
Mature personality was a tripartite structure in Freud’s view, with the id, the
The repressed contents of the unconscious could result in psychological disorders. It was the task of the psychoanalytic therapist to discover the repressed, hidden contents of the patient’s unconscious and to help the patient achieve insight into the psychological roots of his problems. According to psychoanalytic theory, once insight was achieved, the psychological problems would fade away because the insight eliminated the repressed cause of the problems. The problem for the therapist, of course, was how to get at the contents of the unconscious, since the patient did not have conscious access to this material. Symbolic interpretations of various forms of behavior, from dreams to accidents, became the primary method by which psychoanalysts attempted to delve into the unconscious. Freud tried hypnosis for a time, but abandoned it. He became especially enthusiastic about the method of free association and dream interpretation as roads to the contents of the unconscious. In free association, the patient simply says anything that comes to mind, often while reclining on the analyst’s couch. Freud felt that such free associations would be uncensored by higher levels of consciousness and would thus reflect the contents of the unconscious. If these free associations were interpreted using the proper psychoanalytic symbology, they could give valuable information about the patient’s hidden fears, anxieties, and desires. Another valuable source of such information was to be found in dreams. For Freud, a dream had two types of content, manifest content and latent content. Manifest content referred to the psychoanalytically uninteresting images of the dream itself. The latent content was the meaning hidden in those images. Latent content could be revealed only through the analyst’s symbolic interpretation of the images in the dream. Thus, “all sharp and elongated weapons, knives, daggers, and pikes represent the male member…. Small boxes, chests, cupboards, and ovens correspond to the female [sex] organ; also cavities, ships, and all kinds of vessels. A room in a dream generally represents a woman” (Freud 1913/1950, p. 242). The symbolism could be much more complex: “a woman’s hat may often be interpreted with certainty as the male genitals. In the dreams of men one often finds the necktie as a symbol for the penis” (p. 243). Everyday errors and slips of the tongue were also interpreted, symbolically, as reflecting hidden conflicts and motivations.
There is an extremely serious problem in symbolic interpretation, whether it is behavior or anything else that is being interpreted: Such interpretations are inherently nonfalsifiable. This is especially true in psychoanalytic theory, where the concept of repression can be used to further protect any interpretation, no matter how absurd, against falsification. Consider a hypothetical example in which a woman dreams that a man forces his way into her apartment through the front door. Doors and other entrances are said to be symbolic representations of the vagina. Since the “entry” in the dream was forced, the easy interpretation of this dream is that it symbolizes rape. Perhaps the dreamer has a great fear of rape or perhaps she has a hidden desire to be raped or otherwise sexually abused. Is there any way to disprove either of these symbolic interpretations? Absolutely not—if we ask the woman, and she protests that she is neither abnormally afraid of rape nor desirous of being raped, it merely shows that her fear or desire is deeply hidden. In fact, her denial is interpreted as further evidence that the interpretation is true. Thus, no matter whether she agrees with the interpretation or argues against it, her behavior will be seen by the psychoanalyst as supporting the interpretation.
The nonfalsifiability of symbolic interpretations of dreams is not limited to psychoanalytic interpretations. Rather, it applies to any type of symbolic interpretation. In nonpsychoanalytic symbolic schemes, where repression does not play such a large role in protecting an interpretation from falsification, another mechanism operates to make the interpretation seem more valid than it is. This mechanism is highly similar to the fallacy of personal validation that was discussed in chapter 2. It will be recalled that this fallacy convinces people that the vague
