Sax on Freud (2)

Sax on Freud (2)

1. How to succeed without success?

   • HIstorians have long recognised that the nazi antagonism to Freud was a critical factor to the acceptance of Freud's theories achieved in the US over the ensuing twenty years, despite the total absence of any data supporting those theories. The book burning on the night of Kristallnacht provoked disgust and revulsion in Britain and the US, two counties with a long tradition of free speech. The nazis denounced Freud as an idiot and a pervert. No good American wanted to admit to being in agreement with the nazis.
   • Despite the incredibility of his evidence, by 1942 Freud's theories were accepted as truth throughout Britain and the US.
     • The Great War: the chaos of war gave support to Freud's theories about the unconscious. Freud refuted the 20th century thought about the rational man. The slaughter ensued in WWII supported his theory.
   • Sex sells! Men for whom sex really is the chief motivation in life found it easy to accept Freud's fundumental postulates, and such men may have bee disproportionately represented in the mental health profession of the time.
   • ABsolution of Guilt: I don't have to feel guilty anymore, because what i thought was a sin isn't a sin after all.
   • Nature of his theory makes it very hard to reject. SOme scholars tried to resist the onslaught of the Freudian movement as it swept over the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. These valient scholars were told that their objections were merely signs of their own incomplete psychosexual development. Objections to Freud need not be refuted; those objections wee instead regarded merely as syptoms of the objector's repression and immaturity.
     • For example: Ferenczi: like Freud a generation earlier, he began to recognise that repeated episodes of sexual abuse could understandably give rise to all sorts of psychiatric problems late in life. He suggested that perhaps Freud should not have changed his mind in 1897; maybe Freud's original idea about the reality of child sexual abuse was correct.
       • Freud and his minions made no attempt to investigate whether Ferenczi was right wrong.

2. Problems or psa

   • The most fundumental reason Freud's theories were able to remain popular for so long was the lack of any superior alternative. By 1954, there was no truly effective therapy available for depression, anxiety of schizophrenia.
   • Chlorpromazine: introduced in 1954 under the brand name Thorazine was the first medication that actually worked for psychotic disorders. patients who were previously confined to straightjackets of shackles now could be released from bondage.
     • Freudian psychiatrists themselves were not convinced - called the drugs 'glorified sedatives'.
   • The advent of pharmacotherapy damaged Freudian psa in many ways
     • 1: New medications were more effective
     • 2: They were much cheaper
     • 3: the effectiveness of the medications disproved Freud's theories (especially the continuity theory)
     • Another hammer to the brittle Freudian edifice was the 'outcome studies' begun by Hans Ensenck in the 1950s. he asked whether Freudian psa worked better than any other 'talking-cure', such a pastour sitting with a patient and talking scripture? He found that whilst non-Freudian talking cure was not worse than no therapy at all Freudian therapy was infact worse than no therapy at all.
     • The Freudian analysts didn't help themselves. They seems to be more interested in prolonging their patients therapy than healing the patient.
       • Example: Lithium as a cure for manic depressives was prooven to be effective treatement for manic-depressive disorder in 1954. Despite the high quality of research proving the benifits of Lithium, the Freudian analysts who controlled psychiatry throughout the 1950s and 1960s were able to prevent its use in the US in the 1970s.