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Freud scholar Harold Blum said Freud is generally recognized as a figure of immense cultural importance. He changed the way we understand drama, history, and biography and gave us a new picture of how a person becomes a person. Do you agree?
It is certainly true now. How long will this last? We do not know whether this is a permanent contribution. But Freud has certainly made the psychological understanding of people a phenomenon that affects our response to all those things: literature, drama, the history of a person, historical understanding, biography—all of that has changed.
Is that influence on the wane?
Yes, and for a number of reasons. While Freud's initial impact was profound, it has been absorbed or completed. Also, psychotherapy today is preoccupied, on the one hand, with medication, and on the other hand, with behavioral and cognitive strategies for dealing with very specialized symptoms and problems. Freud's influence is on the wane because he had nothing to contribute to the biochemical nature of mental problems or to the behavioral and cognitive strategies of dealing with particular anxieties or phobias.
So there is no revival of psychoanalysis, as far as you can tell, among your colleagues.
Not as far as I can tell. Psychoanalysis is continuing to feel the impact of its critics, and its influence is steadily dwindling. For example, 30 years ago most of the departments of psychiatry in the medical schools were headed up by a Freudian. Today, I do not know if any are. It is all neuroscience/biochemistry in psychiatry. There haven't been any major new psychoanalytic ideas for quite some time.
Perhaps equally significant is the impact of health maintenance organizations. HMOs have had a negative impact on all forms of long-term psychotherapy because they simply will not pay for it. They'll give you seven, maybe fourteen, sessions, and that means that there is a terrific emphasis on short-term, positive results. So the people who are in psychoanalysis today largely must pay for it out of their own pocket. Its primary appeal today is to people who want an intellectual understanding of themselves and of the world from the perspective of psychoanalysis, a kind of psychological Stoicism imbued with the tragic view of life.
You say that Freud's intellectual credibility is on the wane, but his influence is everywhere in the popular culture—especially in the way we see our own personal past, and in the way we view sexuality. Are there any positive insights that we have gained from Freud?
He invented a number of major approaches. He invented the notion of psychotherapy, the "talking cure," as we understand it today. He brought attention to the importance of early childhood, namely the effects of trauma, distortion, and other phenomena in the first three years of life. His primary focus on child development was from the third year on, but he did talk about the earlier years as well, and later psychoanalysts have developed many theories based on the first two years of life. He was the first to show that the kind of bendings that take place in childhood can lead to later mental pathologies.
This is positive because it has made us much more aware of the impact of childhood experience and its long-term consequences. The only psychological interpretations we have of early childhood traumas as determining later mental pathologies are a part of the psychoanalytic tradition of Freud. There are no Jungian theories of that. Psychoanalysis is the only game in town.
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