Psychoanalysis - the real truth

Is it logical to believe that your hysterical fear of spiders stems from
your mother’s overprotective behavior during your childhood?

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     The field and practice of psychoanalysis is rich with false and misleading claims about the mind, mental health and mental illness. For example, in psychoanalysis; schizophrenia and depression are not neurochemical disorders, but narcissistic disorders. Autism and other brain disorders are not brain chemistry problems but mothering problems. These illnesses do not require pharmacological treatment. They require only “talk” therapy. Similar positions are taken for anorexia nervosa and Tourette’s syndrome. There exists no credible evidence to substantiate the psychoanalytic view of these or any other mental illnesses.

     Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychoanalysis, believed he understood the nature of schizophrenia. To him, it was not a brain disorder, but a disturbance in the unconscious (subconscious mind) caused by unresolved feelings of homosexuality or incestuous desires. To protect his illusory theory about schizophrenia, he advanced the premise that psychoanalysis could not work with schizophrenics because such patients ignore their therapist’s insights and are resistant to treatment.

     Later psychoanalysts would claim, with equal certainty and equally lacking scientific evidence, that schizophrenia is caused by smothering mothering. In 1948, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, for example, gave birth to the term “schizophrenogenic mother,” the mother whose bad mothering causes her child to become schizophrenic. Other analysts before her had supported the notion with anecdotes and intuitions, and over the next twenty years many more would follow her misguided lead.

     Would you treat a broken leg or diabetes with “talk” therapy or by interpreting the patient’s dreams? Of course not. Imagine the reaction if a diabetic being told their illness is due to “masturbatory conflict” or “displaced eroticism.” One might as well tell patients they are possessed by demons. That is the same as giving them a psychoanalytic explanation of their physical disease or disorder. Exorcism of demons by the shaman or priest, exorcism of childhood experiences by the psychoanalyst - what’s the difference?

     How can anyone still believe that neurochemical or other physical disorders are caused by repressed or sublimated traumatic or sexual (or both) childhood experiences? Probably for the same reasons that theologians refuse to give up their elaborate systems of thought in the face of overwhelming evidence that their theories are little more than vast metaphysical cobwebs. They seem to receive significant levels of institutional reinforcement for their socially created roles and ideas, most which would not stand up in the face of empirical testing. If their notions can’t be tested, they can’t be disproved. What can’t be disproved, and also has the backing of powerful institutions or establishments, can go on for centuries as being respectable and valid, regardless of its basic emptiness, falsity or capacity for harm.

     The most fundamental concept of psychoanalysis is the notion of the unconscious mind as a reservoir for repressed memories of traumatic events which continuously influence conscious thought and behavior. The scientific evidence for this notion of unconscious repression is lacking, as is any evidence that conscious thought or behavior is influenced by repressed memories.

     Related to these questionable assumptions of psychoanalysis are two equally questionable methods of investigating the alleged memories hidden in the unconscious - free association and the interpretation of dreams. Neither method is capable of scientific formulation or empirical testing. Both are metaphysical blank checks to speculate at will, with no anchors in reality.

     Scientific research on human memory does not support the psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious mind repressing sexual and traumatic memories of either childhood or adulthood. There is, however, ample evidence there exists a type of memory of which we are not consciously aware. Scientists refer to this type of memory as implicit memory. Research has shown that to have memories requires extensive development or patterning of the frontal lobe neurons, which infants and young children lack. Memories must also be encoded to be lasting. If encoding is absent, amnesia follows, as in the case of many of our dreams. Fragmented and implicit memories are all that remain of an original experience when encoding is weak. Thus, the likelihood of infant memories of abuse, or of anything else for that matter, is near zero.

     Implicit memories of abuse can occur, but not under the conditions assumed to be the basis for repression. Implicit memories of abuse occur when a person is rendered unconscious during the attack and cannot encode the experience completely. A a rape victim rendered unconscious before or during the attack will not likely remember being raped. If the attack takes place on a brick pathway, the words “brick” and “path” might keep popping up in the victims mind, but not be connected to the rape itself. A rape victim with this type of implicit memory would become very upset when taken back to the scene of the assault, but wouldn’t remember what happened there.

     It is unlikely that hypnosis, free association, or any other therapeutic method could help the victim remember what happened to her. She has no explicit memory because she was unable, at the time of the assault, to encode the trauma due to loss of consciousness. The best a psychoanalyst or other repressed-memory therapist could do is to create a false memory in this victim, thus abusing her again in the process.

     Essentially connected to the psychoanalytic view of repression is the assumption that parental treatment of children, especially mothering, is the source of many, if not most, adult problems ranging from personality disorders to emotional problems to mental illnesses. There is little question that if children are treated cruelly throughout childhood, their lives as adults will be profoundly influenced by such treatment. It is a big conceptual leap from this fact to the notion that all sexual experiences in childhood will cause problems in later life, or that all problems in later life, including sexual problems, are due to childhood experiences. There is no credible evidence to support these notions. In many ways, psychoanalytic therapy is based on a search for

• memories that can not possibly exist (repressed childhood memories)
• an assumption that may be entirely false (that childhood experiences caused the patient's problem) and
• a therapeutic theory with no scientific proof (that bringing repressed memories to consciousness will result in a cure).

     This elaborate illusion, a collection of scientifically sounding concepts which pretend to explain the deep mysteries of consciousness and behavior, would best be abandoned by intelligent society.

     The only positive thing which may have resulted from the method of psychoanalysis developed by Freud a century ago in Vienna, is a psychoanalyst’s apparent desire to understand those whose behavior and thoughts cross the boundaries of convention set by civilization and cultures. That it is no longer fashionable to condemn and ridicule those with behavioral or thought disorders is due in no small part to the tolerance promoted by psychoanalysis. Beyond that, controlled experiments and other scientific research continue to negate the existence of any credible evidence establishing the reliability, usefulness, or effectiveness of psychoanalysis in any form.

– RTC