Oedipal wrecks: has a century of Freud bred a country of narcissists?

• Author: Torrey, E. Fuller

To us he is no more a person Now but a whole climate of opinion.

W.H. Auden

Has a century of Freud bred a country of narcissists?

A few decades ago, Freudian theory was only sold at expensive Central Park West psychoanalytic boutiques to customers like Mabel Dodge and Marshall Field III. Like most luxuries in America, however, it has been repackaged and is now available at McFreud outlets everywhere.

If you somehow made it through college without being exposed to the theories of Sigmund Freud, you will almost certainly be confronted with them shortly thereafter: You will be one, or you will know one, of the 10 million Americans who seek help from psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychiatric social workers every year. Yet those Americans are merely the most easily apparent portion of the counseling and psychotherapy iceberg. Millions more-nobody knows precisely how many-seek help from a variety of marriage counselors, family therapists, pastoral counselors, failed encyclopedia salesmen, enterprising bartenders, and self-appointed gurus who range from caring and competent to, as Shakespeare would say, rascals and knaves.

Although an increasing proportion of counseling and psychotherapy is not explicitly Freudian, most of it defers to the Viennese doctor indirectly. For the common denominator of virtually all counseling and psychotherapy is the Freudian assumption that intrapersonal and interpersonal problems-shyness, difficulty making a commitment, depression, anxiety, obsessiveness, slovenliness, substance abuse, eating disorders, loneliness, the inability to find meaning in life-originate in childhood experiences, especially in one's relations with parents. Thus solving those problems involves a painstaking, guided tour through one's childhood memories.

Take codependence counseling, the latest in a long line of therapy fads in America. Pia Mellody, a movement leader, explains that codependence is caused by parental "abuse" of children, also called "dysfunctional parenting," and further defined as "any experience that was less-than-nurturing or shaming." The treatment for problems of codependence is quintessentially Freudian: "Recovery involves reviewing your past to identify formative experiences in your early life that were less-than-nurturing or abusive."

Freudian theory has invaded our thinking to such a degree that we are barely aware of its existence. For instance, in 1990, Kitty Dukakis published an autobiography and traveled the talk show circuit explaining how her addiction to alcohol and drugs had been caused by her mother's rejection.

Yet this steady diffusion has transpired despite a large body of research on psychotherapy during the last three decades that has generally concluded that the particular brand of psychotherapy that Freud promoted-psychoanalysis-has proven to be no more or less effective than other brands of psychotherapy. As psychologists Seymour Fisher and Roger Greenberg, in an exhaustive review of research on the efficacy of psychoanalysis, concluded, "There is very little evidence in the experimental literature even suggesting that the results of therapies called psychoanalysis' are in any way different from the results obtained by treatments given other labels." Nonetheless, in no other nation in the world have Freudian counseling and psychotherapy become so much a part of the culture as in America. And this American anomaly has implications-including disturbing ones-that cry out for examination.

To be sure, America's embrace of Freud has done some good. His popularity has promoted a more inner-directed culture in which intra-personal feelings and interpersonal relations are accorded greater importance than the mere accumulation of material possessions. Many Americans will argue that the pursuit of psychic nirvana itself has greatly enhanced the quality of their lives. And Freud's theory has surely encouraged the growth of humanistic and egalitarian thought in America. Although Freud personally valued neither of these attitudes very highly, his theory evolved, in some liberals' hands, into a call for social reform. In a 1960 essay, critic Walter Kaufmann, comparing Freud to Abraham Lincoln, articulated this reformist subtext. "Like no man before him, [Freud] lent substance to the notion that all men are brothers. Criminals and madmen are not devils in disguise, but men and women who have problems similar to our own; and there, but for one experience or another, go you and l."

Yet, while Freud's theory and its ensuing movement have made important contributions to American thought and culture, they have also brought liabilities, chief among them the promotion of irresponsibility. This evolved perhaps logically from the belief that individuals are governed by powerful unconscious forces, arising from early childhood experiences, which thereby usurp their freedom of action. That conviction has led, in the words of one writer, to "the golden age of exoneration."

Today, the Freudian paradigm is so intertwined with liberalism and humanism in America that to doubt the former is to implicitly denigrate the latter. But in the areas of childrearing, mental health, and criminal justice, the denial of personal responsibility has had a grimly unhumanistic effect. Freudian men and women are seen increasingly as puppets of their psyches, governed primarily by the edicts of their egos. The corollary to don't-blame-me is blame-my-parents. In the Freudian schema, mother, father, family, social circumstance, and culture become the causal agents for whatever is wrong. The ripple of personal irresponsibility spreads outward until the very terms "good" and "bad" seem to lose their meaning. In fact, the only thing that does seem to have true meaning is the search for the truth about one's self.

There have always been self-centered individuals, but twentieth-century America may be the first place in which their quest for self and happiness has been equated with the greater good. In The Culture of Narcissism, historian Christopher Lasch observed, "In a dying culture, narcissism appears to embody-in the guise of personal `growth' and `awareness' the highest attainment of spiritual enlightenment."' Lasch himself, however, relied heavily on Freudian theory for his formulations of narcissism. Like countless other critics, he failed to understand that a major contributor to the narcissism he described was one Sigmund Freud.

Nasal academy

Who was this great man of psychoanalysis? If you had asked that question at a Viennese gathering in 1895, your companions would probably have laughed. Freud, then a 39-year-old physician with a private practice specializing in cases of neurosis, was the man who saw sex in everything," one of Freud's colleagues recalled. "It was considered bad taste to bring up Freud's name in the presence of ladies. They would blush when his name was mentioned."

While Freud did not actually see "sex in everything," he did believe that sexual abuse of children and sexual repression were the causes of anxiety neurosis, phobias, obsessions, hysteria, and neurasthenia. In 1895-a critical year in the doctor's thinking-he specifically singled out voluntary or involuntary abstinence, sexual intercourse with incomplete gratification, [and] coitus interruptus" as pathological factors. A decade later, he would broaden his theory to indict sexual problems as the cause of all neuroses. In a statement widely quoted by his followers, Freud asserted that "no neurosis is possible with a normal vita sexualis"-the logical implication being that neurosis would be far less common if people's sexual lives were less inhibited and repressed.

But back in 1895, Freud was still figuring things out-deeply engaged in active research on the relationship between sexual function and neurosis with his collaborator and close friend Wilhelm Fliess. Fliess was a Berlin-based ear, nose, and throat specialist who believed that "the misuse of the sexual function"-especially masturbation, coitus interruptus, and the use of condoms-caused damage to the nervous system and also to tissues in the nose. Fliess had localized specific "genital spots" in the nose and believed that neurosis caused by the misuse of the sexual organs...