You, Too, Can Be A
FREUD BASHER
A Most Merry and Illustrated And Objective Guide

If you are feeling down in the dumps - perhaps because your underlying interconsciousness has failed to self-actualize with the subdominant manifestation of its preprotean idiomorphic synthesis - there's one sure way to bring yourself up. Just start bashing someone. Verbally, we hasten to add, not physically. And who better to bash than perhaps the most influential thinker from the last millennium? We mean, of course, Herr Doktor Sigismund Schlomo Freud, better known to everyone as Sigmund.

Sigmund (or Sigi as his mother called him) was born in Moravia (in modern day Czech Republic) in 1856. His dad, Jakob, eked out a living as a wool merchant. The wool business wasn't very lucrative at any time, and when a depression hit the year after Sigmund was born, the Freuds pulled up stakes. They settled in Vienna where young Sigmund attended medical school and graduated in 1881. He then studied with the pioneering neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot and returned to the fancy and coveted (and unpaid) position of Privatdozent at his old alma mater (which means he could give lectures in the auditorium). Of course, he had to make a living, too, so he started up his own private practice in 1886. He decided to specialize in neurology (like Jean-Martin), and he remained in Vienna for over half a century.

Despite what you may hear, Freud's ideas were fairly well received almost from day one. By the time he hit fifty, he was well on his way to becoming the celebrated figure we know today. Because Sigmund's theories seemed to be so revolutionary, it was quite fashionable (at least for a while) to be a Freudian (the popular film maker, Roger Corman, deliberately incorporated Sigmund's ideas into his set designs and plots).

So at least for the first half of the Twentieth Century the Freud Defenders pretty much kept the upper hand over the Bashers. But with development of modern designed clinical experiments and the honing of what constitutes a testable scientific theory, the bashing of Sigmund took on a more rigorous tone. By the last two decades of the century, we were learning that Sigmund's techniques and theories were no more reliable or scientific than what you'd get if you went to an astrologer or fortune teller. So with the arrival of the Millennium, it had become not only quite chic to bash Sigmund, but quite easy to do so.

Our goal here, though, is not to judge whether Sigmund should be bashed, but simply to provide instructions on how to do so. As usual, then, the first place to start is pretty much at the beginning. As a young physician Sigmund's interest in neurology brought him into contact with Dr. Josef Breuer, another Viennese physician, who had been working with patients afflicted with "hysteria". That is, Josef's patients were people who exhibited abnormal physical symptoms, but who were not - supposedly - physically ill. Josef's most famous case - and the first target for the Freud Basher - is that of Anna O., a case which served as the basis of the 1962 Montgomery Clift movie, Freud.

In the movie, Anna's name was Cecily, and she was played by Susannah York (better known to today's popular culture crowd as Superman's mother, Lara, in the Christopher Reeve Superman movies). Susannah - that is, Cecily - was from the well-to-do Koertner family and had come under the care of Joseph (not Josef), who was played by former song and dance man (and HUAC witness) Larry Parks. Actually Larry played the part very well, far better than you might expect for someone whose claim to fame had been lip syncing Al Jolson songs.

Cecily had been suffering from various "hysterical" symptoms that arose after her father died, two of which were blindness and the inability to drink water from a glass. But Larry would hypnotize her, she'd recall the memory that led to her hysteria, and hey, presto!, she'd be cured. That was fine for the drinking part (she had seen her dog drink from a cup her pappy gave her), but for the blindness it didn't work.

Under Larry's hypnosis, what Cecily remembered was this. When her mom was out, two doctors came to her home. They escorted the younger girl to a Protestant hospital. With someone providing background music, the doctors and Cecily picked their way through a bevy of nurses and a surprising absence of male physicians. Finally they came to a bed where lay the resupine (and quite dead) form of her father. Her dad had (we guess) taken ill and died in the hospital. But the doctors needed a positive identification, and so they went and got Cecily. But being forced to look on her father's body was so traumatizing that Cecily was struck blind. But now, even though she now "remembered" the events, she still couldn't see. That's where Sigmund - or rather Montgomery - came in.

When Larry once more failed to cure Cecily's blindness, Montgmery asked if he could (pardon the bad joke) have a bash. Montgomery then began asking Cecily about discrepancies in her story. For instance, staff physicians themselves would not personally summons a person to the hospital. Also few hospitals, then or now, keep an orchestra. So under Montgomery's gentle prodding (again no improper reference intended) Cecily now remembered that it was two policemen who came to her house and took her - not to a hospital - but to - well, let's say to an "establishment" devoted to masculine deportment. Papa, it seems, had been one of the firm's more enthusiastic customers, and it was during the exertions of personal congress that he had succumbed (literally) to the charms of one of the employees. The cops made Cecily identify her dad as he lay in the bed while the object of Papa's last minute attentions sat by looking sullenly on. With the correct memory in place, then Cecily, although understandably upset, got her sight back.

First, let's point out that like virtually all biopics, the scriptwriter ignored whatever didn't make a good story and invented parts that did. The whole movie, in fact, is heavily fictionalized and Cecily's part was extremely heavily fictionalized.

Cecily or Anna's real name was neither Susannah nor Cecily nor Anna. She was Bertha Pappenheim, and she was born in Vienna in 1859. She was Josef's patient, not Sigmund's. Sigmund was not involved in her treatment at all, and as far as we can tell, he never met her. So to that extent it might seem unfair that we're bashing Sigmund for a case of Josef's. But that's the way it goes.

The really key point to remember as we begin to bash, is that Bertha's dad did not have the - ah - "neurosis" - that Cecily's dad had in the movie, that is, a hankering for paid escorts. Certainly, Herr Pappenheim did not die in mid-stroke as in the movie. Instead he died of tuberculosis and under Bertha's care in their home. Nor was Bertha the naive adolescent in the movie. She was a twenty-one year old woman when her father died and was Sigmund's junior by only three years.

So what does the Basher do with all this? It's all very simple really. After all, the rules of Freud Bashing are so straightforward that even the novice can begin at once.

Step number one of any good Freud Bashing is to simply state, flatly and clearly, that Sigmund was wrong. Naturally the more specific you can be the better, but a bit of vagueness is OK. For our purposes, then, we'll say Bertha was not having emotional or mental problems. Instead, she was suffering from a bonafide physical illness. That way we can assert that Sigmund was a jerk and a hack and didn't recognize what we, sitting comfortably at our computers, see at once.

This, of course, places a bit of a burden on the Basher. Freud Defenders - a crotchety, curmudgeonly crowd, say the Bashers - will want some kind of support or evidence for our claim. Now as unreasonable as the Freud Basher may consider such a demand, there are a number of options to pursue. In our case, the easiest thing is to latch onto one of Bertha's primary symptoms, and one that was conveniently left out of the movie. That was a severe and persistent cough.

Now the Defenders that do mention the cough maintain it, like Bertha's other symptoms, were psychosomatic. But why must it be psychosomatic, the Bashers muse. After all, isn't it possible - just possible - that after nearly daily contact with a family member who was ill from tuberculosis, that, Bertha, too, had contracted the disease; a disease, by the way, where a major symptom is indeed a severe and persistent cough?

Now with the first step complete - finding a physical illness that Bertha may have contracted - the Basher still has to deal with the other - the "psychotic" - symptoms. It is indisputable that Bertha did indeed suffer depression so severe that she was at times suicidal, as well as from audio and visual hallucinations. She sometimes would converse in French or English, apparently not realizing she wasn't speaking her native German. She also went through "spells" where her mind seemed to wander off, and she would loose touch with reality. (This latter symptom, by the way, Josef interpreted as self-induced hypnosis, and it was these mental states he claimed helped effect her cure.)

But Bertha also had other symptoms. She would sometimes lose the feeling in her feet and hands and suffer paralysis and spasms. Traditionally these too have been interpreted as part of her "hysteria".

But were they? Remember, Bertha was being treated more than a century ago. Today someone with these symptoms, particularly the more physical afflictions like paralysis and loss of sensation, would be handled completely differently. First, their family physician would probably not try to treat such patients. Instead he would refer them to a specialist - not to a psychiatrist, we add - but to a neurologist. The neurologist would then run an MRI - not available in Sigmund and Josef's time - in order to detect possible abnormalities in the brain.

So how does this help us as Bashers? In other words can people with tuberculosis - a disease normally thought of as one of the lungs - develop a physical problem in the brain? Well, following a refreshing dip into the medical literature, the Freud Basher will be quite happy to learn that they can indeed. More to the point, for such patients the symptoms are quite like those Bertha experienced, including the so-called mental or emotional problems.

So Bertha, the Bashers can now maintain - far from being a flighty and dainty Victorian damsel with an overdeveloped infatuation with her father - was a mature and intelligent young woman suffering from an intracranial tuberculoma. That is, Bertha had a blob of gunk in her brain from the tuberculosis she had contracted from her father. This produced both mental and physical symptoms reported in her case. Sigmund, then, the Basher triumphantly cries, was so intent on finding hysteria that he misread the signs of a true physical illness. What a jerk!

But, the Freud Defenders say, arms akimbo, is there not ample evidence Bertha's problems were emotional and mental? After all, didn't Breuer's hypnotic sessions relieve her symptoms and didn't he ultimately cure her? Au contraire, meine Freunde, sniff the Bashers frostily. They didn't, and he didn't. Bertha continued to exhibit her symptoms long after Sigmund and Josef wrote up their findings in Four Studies in Hysteria in 1895. And both men knew darn well, and as their correspondence attests, that Bertha wasn't really cured. So Bertha's "cures", if not outright inventions, were nothing more than the general feeling of relief that anyone feels when talking about their problems. Her "relapses" - the term used by the Defenders - simply means she wasn't cured in the first place.

Eventually Bertha had to go into a sanitarium where after some time - and not under Sigmund or Joseph's care, we should add - she improved sufficiently to manage on her own. Again this fits the tuberculosis diagnosis quite well since in that day and age the only way a person could hope to recover from tuberculosis was by complete rest. Even today, though it's not common, tubercular lesions, like most diseases, can clear up spontaneously. And for the rest of her long life, Bertha, who later became a leader for women's and social rights, said her celebrated cure under the hand of Sigmund Freud was bogus.

At this point the Freud Defenders will immediately fire back that this - quote - "diagnosis" - unquote - is entirely speculative. Besides, even if true, it's absurd to expect Sigmund to recognize physical problems with the brain that were total unknowns to a physician in his time and for which there were no tests. So Sigmund shouldn't be blamed for not following medical procedures that lay a century in the future. Besides, in the final assessment, no harm was done.

"No harm, indeed", snorts the Basher. Look at the famous case of Sergei Pankejeff who Sigmund dubbed "the Wolf Man" (Sergei had a dream where some wolves were sitting in a tree). Sigmund claimed he had cured Sergei of severe depression after four years of $8 an hour treatments (big bucks at the time). But the truth was Sergei continued to suffer severe psychological problems and remained under (unsuccessful) treatment until he died in 1979. It's hard to believe that by claiming a cure when there wasn't one, Sigmund did not harm Sergei.

(Now do you get the joke of the picture? Sigmund and the Wolfman. Geddit? The Wolfman? Geddit?)

But if Sigmund's Defenders still think Sigmund's modus did his patients no harm, the Bashers maintain, they should go read Sigmund's own books. There you'll find the biggest club a Freud Basher could ever want.

This cudgel is found in Sigmund's short and readable and (we must admit it) entertaining The Psychopathology of Everyday Life and Sigmund hands it to us himself. There he relates a case involving a fourteen year old girl. She had been complaining of stomach pains and probably other symptoms which aren't detailed - perhaps behavioral and emotional problems such as you might find in a teenage girl who had been suffering from continuous stomach pain. Her mama and papa took her to a clinic, and she came to Sigmund's attention. Here's the case write-up in the Good Doctor's own words.

The child became afflicted with an unmistakable hysteria, which quickly and thoroughly improved under my care. After this improvement the child was taken away from me by the parents. She still complained of abdominal pains which had played the part in the hysterical symptoms. Two months later she died of sarcoma of the abdominal glands. The hysteria, to which she was greatly predisposed, took the tumor formation as a provocative agent, and I, fascinated by the tumultuous but harmless manifestations of hysteria, perhaps overlooked the first sign of the insidious and incurable disease.

Translated into our modern idiom, a young girl was having stomach pains. Sigmund said they were psychosomatic and that he cured her. Two months later the girl died of stomach cancer. But Sigmund still said the stomach pains - "harmless", we're told - were psychosomatic. And what did Sigmund claim caused the psychosomatic pains? The stomach cancer!

At this point, the Freud Basher can only sputter that not only was Dr. Sigmund a phony, fraud, and a jerk, he was a quack. And a dangerous quack at that.

These, then, are the basic principles for delivering a good Freud bashing. Find out where Sigmund was wrong about a diagnosis (and he was often wrong), and where he really didn't cure the patient (ditto). Then dip into the medical literature and provide an alternative physical illness. Then consider Sigmund well-bashed.

At this point it's now time for the Bashers to get a little irritated. Despite the ease which Sigmund can now be bashed, non-Freudian psychologists and psychiatrists - that is, those who don't really believe Sigmund's theories - still look on Sigmund fairly benignly. The rationale - whether Bashers like it or not - is because Sigmund really has been the most influential pioneer in the study of the human mind. Even the modern fields like cognitive science - which interprets human recognition and thoughts totally at odds with Sigmund's theories - ultimately trace their development back to work that Sigmund had wrought. In science, after all, wrong theories are not necessarily bad theories, and the argument is that we should no more bash Sigmund than we should Aristotle, Ptolemy, Galen, or Vesalius.

But how, the Bashers say, can anyone accept Sigmund's methods - that is psychoanalysis - if it's based not only bogus science even if not deliberate fraud? Well, there are valid medical practices that began as nonsense or as a result of odd-ball theories. Five thousand years ago people were chopping holes in their friends' heads if they were acting weird. Because you thought you were "relieving evil spirits" doesn't mean that trepanning to relieve pressure on the brain isn't a legitimate medical technique. So just because Sigmund plopped people on a couch and let them talk doesn't mean that something like non-directional therapy - where the patient is not steered in any direction by the therapist's preconceived theories - might not help a person realize underlying causes of true emotional problems. Whether that's worth the $300 an hour twice-a-week sessions with your psychoanalyst or whether you should just take Prozac is, of course, something we'll let the psychologists and psychiatrists, sociologists, neurologists, and pharmacologists to debate. But whether you are one of those accepting his theories (a seemingly decreasing lot) or refuting them (as has been popular in recent years), you can't ignore them.

A crucial point is that although Sigmund is often regarded as a guiding Twentieth Century mind, he was born in 1856 and so was a contemporary of men like Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Pat Garrett, and William Bonney. So to be honest, we should just label Sigmund for what he was; a Nineteenth Century physician practicing Nineteenth Century medicine. With that in mind Sigmund's whoppers will make a little more sense.

It isn't true, as some people think, that Sigmund exempted himself from his theories. After a psychological "self-analysis", he finally decided that he harbored resentment against his father Jakob whom he saw as a competitor for the attentions of his mother, Amalie. Certainly Sigmund did not dismiss his own habits with the famous "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" quote any more than Willie Sutton said he robbed banks because "that's where the money is" or Groucho Marx said he loved his cigar but he "takes it out once in a while." Instead, Sigmund said that his compulsive smoking was a substitute for that greatest of all addictions which is ..., well, since this is a family website we won't get into what he thought about that.

Sigmund also had some of his own problems that were due to the vagaries of the medicine of the times. As a young physician he prescribed (and took) cocaine (perfectly legal in his day) for virtually everything and thought its effects were beneficial. He even sent some to his fiancée Martha Bernays, saying it would "make her strong and give her cheeks a red color". It could also - as he learned from one of his friends to whom he sent the "medicine" - result in an increased dosage requirement, psychosis, formication (no, no - the word is form-ication - that is, the hallucinations that bugs or other critters are crawling over your skin), and finally, in death.

What was particularly irksome to Sigmund was that he missed the one true medical use of cocaine. That was as a local anesthetic, particularly for eye surgery. Instead it was his colleague, Karl Koller, who after hearing Sigmund mention how you'd get a numbness in his lips if you took a sip of a cocaine cocktail, applied it to his ophthalmological surgery.

But what really caused Sigmund problems was he smoked like the veritable chimney. Eventually he gave up his cocaine (when he was pushing 40), but despite angina attacks of increasing intensity, he was never able to wean himself from his strong German cigars (typically 20 a day). Contrary to his own doctor's frequent orders, he kept puffing away.

Then in 1923, at the age of 67, Sigmund developed a soreness in his mouth. He ignored it for a couple of months and then asked a doctor friend to have a look. His friend said it was a bad "leukoplakia" (white patches in the mouth). A leukoplakia is not necessarily a serious condition, but should still be attended to. Sigmund's friend advised him to stop smoking and have the patch removed. Sigmund did neither and even thought that when he lit up the leukoplakia got better.

Actually what Sigmund had was epithelioma - that is, skin cancer - of the palate. Eventually he suffered through 33 operations and had to have an oral prosthesis installed. Although the pain became increasingly intense, he took no painkillers until near the end when he took aspirin.

After the Anschluss in 1938 (and after a patient and colleague, Countess Marie Bonaparte, paid a hefty ransom), the Nazis allowed Sigmund and his family to leave Austria for London. There, according to the most often repeated story, Sigmund, barely able to speak, reminded his friend, colleague, and physician, Max Schur, of an agreement they had made not to leave the other "in the lurch". So, we're told, Max gave Sigmund an overdose of morphine, and Sigmund died.

That Max, a qualified and able physician, would take a part in an assisted suicide is, of course, absurd. Why, Max would never do anything like that. According to Max, he sedated Sigmund to keep him unconscious, and Sigmund did not die until two days later, most likely not a direct result of the morphine.

Besides, Max wasn't even there. It was Josephine Storrs, a pediatrician and friend of Sigmund and his daugther Anna, who gave Sigmund the morphine.

References

Freud: A Life of Our Time, Peter Gay, Norton (1988). Probably the definitive modern biography and one that is generally quite positive toward Sigmund. Some people were shocked! shocked! to read that physician Max Schur was the agent of an assisted suicide. Although the events happened (sort of) as described, calling this heavy sedation an assisted suicide is at best an oversimplification, particularly given there were no real alternatives to relieve Sigmund's suffering.

 

"Freud's Death: Historical Truth and Biographical Fictions", Roy Lacoursiere, American Imago, 65(1), pp. 107-128 (2008). Although words of caution are plenty about the unreliability of the Internet, the same caution is warranted in reading anything - even those opiates of the masses, books. In this article Roy documents that the story of Sigmund's death, found in authoritative accounts of Ernest Jones, Max Schur, and Peter, is not accurate in the sense the morphine is said to have been administered by Max. Instead, as we said above, it was Josephine.

 

Why Freud Was Wrong. Sin, Science, and Psychoanalysis, Richard Webster, (Basic Books, 1995). Despite the irritation this book raises amongst the Freud Defenders, this is quite a good book in finding out the specific cases where Sigmund screwed up. Some have found the volume rather discursive and hard to follow, but it's worth reading whether you like Sigmund or not.

 

Science: Good, Bad and Bogus, Martin Gardner, Prometheus Books (1981). As always Martin's books are excellent. This volume helps the reader recognize bogus science in general.

In any discipline you have to watch out for the ad hominem argument disguised as a scientific rebuttal. For instance if you say "Freud was wrong", then you might be told something like your opposition to Freudian theory is your transferring the resentment of your father to the image of Freud. Therefore, by rejecting Freud you're rejecting your father as a competitor for your mother's affections and are clearly manifesting a case of the Oedipus complex. In other words, if you're not a Freudian, you are confirming Freud's theories!

Believe it or not, answers like this have been dished out by practicing Freudians to people who object to Freud's theories. Anytime your disagreement with a theory is somehow claimed to be a proof of it, you can bet your sweet id and ego you're on the receiving end of bogus science.

 

A particular irritant by Sigmund's friends is how people trash Sigmund but don't read his works. A very valid argument, but as we saw above, Freud's own writings can give you quite a nice club suitable for bashing. Still, if you want to say you've read Freud, here's some goodies to start with. Some of his early works can also be found on-line.

 

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Sigmund Freud, Penguin Classics, (2003, original edition, 1914). If you want to read Sigmund himself, this is a good place to start. Sigmund - at least under the guide of a good translator - could write very clearly and persuasively. This is the book with the story of the girl suffering - unquote "hysterical" - unquote - stomach cancer.

Online at http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Freud/Psycho/.

 

Studies in Hysteria, Sigmund Freud and Joseph [sic] Breuer (Nicola Luckhurst, Translator), Penguin Books (2004, original edition 1895). The groundbreaking and founding book of psychoanalysis. Unfortunately, most of the "cures" Sigmund and Joseph claimed weren't real, or certainly not lasting.

 

Moses and Monotheism, Sigmund Freud (Katherine Jones, Translator), Vintage, (1967, original edition 1939). This was the last book that Sigmund wrote and the first of Sigmund's books that the author of CooperToons read. Sigmund hypothesizes that Moses got the idea of monotheism from the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten who tried to replace the Egyptian pantheon with a single all powerful God. The arguments Sigmund expounds were not really new, but as usual with Sigmund, the writing is clear, lucid, and very persuasive. Most historians don't buy Sigmund's arguments, though.

Strangely enough, Sigmund missed out on another theory that so far seems not to have been articulated: that it is Christianity that was derived from the beliefs of Ancient Egypt. That there are parallels between the two belief systems is clear, including passages in Egyptian mythology that refer to a single all powerful God and that Gods come in a Trinity of a Papa God, Mama God, and a Baby God. So you can theorize that when Jesus and his family went to Egypt he combined elements of the Egyptian religion with the Judaic practices of his time to produce his own particular philosophy. Right or wrong, you could probably find a publisher to print a book touting this stance.

 

The Penguin Freud Reader, Sigmund Freud, Penguin Books (2006). Buy this and give it a read, and you can thump your chest and say you've "read Freud".

 

Bertha's case has been raked over repeatedly, and everyone has an explanation for her problems. But as far as the author of CooperToons can tell, the specific explanation that Bertha had an intracranial tuberculoma has never before been proposed before now. Although Richard Webster clearly stated her symptoms indicated she had a brain lesions, it's not clear that the possibility was linked to her (possibly) contracting tuberculosis. Another suggestion is she had tubercular meningitis contracted from her dad, but that doesn't really fit the symptoms, mainly because it's almost always fatal if untreated. Anyway you can read what some bonafide experts say about Bertha at:

"O Anna: being Bertha Pappenheim - historiography and biography", Robert Kaplan, Australasian Psychiatry. 12, pp. 62-68, (2004). A review that says the popular view isn't correct.

"Revisiting Anna O.: A case of chemical dependence", Sérgio de Paula Ramos, History of Psychology, 6(3) 239 - 250 (2003). Sergio argues Anna O. can't be understood outside of the drugs she was prescribed and to which he believes she was addicted.

"From 'Anna O.' to Bertha Pappenheim: Transforming Private Pain Into Public Action", Meredith Kimball, History of Psychology, 3, (2000)

"The story of 'Anna O.': A critical review with new data", Henri Ellenberger, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 8, pp, 267-279 (1972).

The Wolfman Sixty Years Later: Conversations With Freud's Controversial Patient, Karin Obholzer, Continuum International Publishers Group, 1982. This is indeed what the title says. Conversation with the 85 year old Segei Pankejeff, Freud's famous "Wolf Man" recorded in the 1970's. These are verbatim transcripts of taped recordings after Segei was admitted to the Vienna Psychiatric Hospital, more for his old age than anything else. Sergei is definitely ambiguous about Sigmund. Perhaps the biggest surprise is that Sergei comes off as lucid and normal. The book, though, can be pretty tough going - it's just like reading the Q &A of a young reporter talking to an octogenarian trying to remember events 60 years ago. Still there's enough here for the Freud Basher to revel in.

Sergei was emphatic that much of what was written about him by Sigmund or Sigmund's followers was simply not true. He would often be surprised when Karin would tell him what he was supposed to have said during the therapy sessions. Fading memories notwithstanding, we have to give Sergei some credibility. After all, he was there.

 

After bashing Sigmund for so long, perhaps we need to ask whether our enthusiasm might cover up places where Sigmund could have been right? There are after all many psychologists, pscyhiatrists, and cognitive scientists who, although they don't believe Sigmund was really correct, still don't believed he merits unrestrained thumping. Below are some references for the non-Freudian non-Basher.

To read about the bashers getting a sound bashing, read the multi-book review from the New York Times, "Flogging Freud" (online at http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05E4D6173DF933A2575BC0A961958260

 

"What Freud Got Right", Fred Guterl, Newsweek, November 11, 2002. An article about how modern imaging of the brain indicates some of Sigmund's ideas may not be too far fetched. Freud-bashers, though, will simply say this means using Sigmund's pseudoscience that any new finding will be able to be fit into his writings. The fact that MRI shows activity in the brain, they say, simply means the brain is a physiological functioning organ like any other, and therefore any thoughts will show up as some change in an MRI. On-line at http://www.newsweek.com/id/66360.

 

"What did Freud get right?", The Psychologist, pp 605-606 (December, 2000). This article points out that the most vehement Freud bashers are actually not psychologists or psychiatrists and include worthies from the realms of social scientists, journalists, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, chemists, and cartoonists. Practicing mental health professionals, even non-Freudian ones, tend to be a bit more willing concede Sigmund may have gotten some things right even while acknowledging, boy, did he blow in other ways. A CooperToons discussion with a cognitive scientist found him quite positive about Sigmund. He mentioned there were cases where Sigmund definitely tried to be scientific even so much as to trying to establish control groups.

This whole issue is a reappraisal of Sigmund by professional psychologists. It points out that at times Sigmund is criticized for ideas he did not advocate. For instance, use of so-called memory recovery has been shown to be extremely unreliable (actually, it's complete hogwash and is even banned in Britain), capable of creating false memories that have devastating effects on the patients and their families (and even the psychiatrists if they get sued and have their licenses revoked). But Freud did not advocate this method for discovering childhood trauma and in fact rejected its reliability. Interestingly, memory - quote - "recovery" - unquote - seems to have become more fashionable after the movie Freud appeared, and you have to wonder how much of this fad came about because inhabitants of our media rich world have such horrible trouble distinguishing the fiction of movies and television from reality.

The memory recovery schtick probably hit the high (or low) point when a Pulitzer prize winning psychiatrist from Harvard medical school stated that recovered memories about alien abductions could not be false memories if you accept modern psychiatric theory. This was not, to say the least, a very ringing endorsement about the reliability of recovered memories, modern psychiatric theory, or Pulitzer Prize winning psychiatrists from Harvard medical school.

And what about psychoanalysis in general, the whole field that Freud wrough? Well, after reading another article, "The Outcome of Psychoanalysis", you're left with the unequivocal and unshakeable opinion that psychoanalysis is like what Chief Dan George said about magic at the end of the movie Little Big Man. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't.

Psychiatric symptoms of patients with intracranial tuberculomae are varied as you might expect since they can form at various points in the brain. But there's no doubt tuberculomae can cause audio and visual hallucinations, paralysis, seizures, spasms, visual problems, and other symptoms of the brain lesions that they are. Here's two articles about this condition. After comparing the symptoms described with Bertha's, it's really hard for cartoonists to come to a conclusion she suffered form anything else.

"Psychiatric Symptoms in a Case of Intracranial Tuberculosis", Andrea Woodroof and Ondria Gleason, Psychosomatics, Vol. 43, pp. 82-84, (February 2002). A most interesting article which has a woman being most cooperative with her doctors, while having suicidal thoughts (and even claiming to have attempted suicide), audio hallucinations, and other psychotic symptoms - due to an intracranial tuberculoma. When the hypothesis of this as the cause of Bertha's problems was put to a licensed medical professional (who prefers to remain anonymous), the author of CooperToons was told that "if not correct, at least the suggestion is credible".

"Brain modules of hallucination: an analysis of multiple patients with brain lesions", Claude M.J. Braun, , Mathieu Dumont, Julie Duval, Isabelle Hamel-Hèbert, Lucie Godbout, Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, Vol 28, pp. 432-449 (2003). A case is listed where visual hallucinations result from a tuberculoma.

Again, on-line at

http://psy.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/43/1/82-a

"The Consumers Union Report: Licit and Illicit Drugs", Edward M. Brecher and the Editors of Consumer Reports Magazine, http://druglibrary.org/schaffer/Library/studies/cu/cumenu.htm

Chapter 24 has the story of Sigmund and his smoking. Chapter 35 tells about his cocaine use. Sigmund's hasty endorsement of cocaine strikes the modern (intelligent) reader as extremely strange. It simply shows that the procedure for proper testing of a drug's effects were not known at that time. Soon Sigmund was sending the drug to his friends with his enthusiasm making him sound more like Timothy Leary (if anyone remembers him) than an M. D.

Finally, we can't end up a discussion of Sigmund without talking about his famous "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" quote. Supposedly after he had given a bunch of far fetched explanations of human behavior, someone asked him what the meaning was of his cigar smoking given the cigar's obviously suggestive shape. So Sigmund gave his famous reply.

Alas, Alan Elms, Professor of Psychology at the University of California at Davis looked into this famous quote and published his finding in "Apocryphal Freud: Sigmund Freud's Most Famous 'Quotations' and Their Actual Sources", in the Annual of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 29, pp. 83-104 (2001). The quote is quite bogus. Alan traced down the earliest attribution to a paper that wasn't published until 1961. The author was none other than Peter Gay who wrote the later definitive biography (which does not have the quote). Peter's article, which did not give a source, quoted Sigmund as saying, "Sometimes a man craves a cigar simply because he wants a good smoke." But in 1985, in response to Alan's query, Peter said he never found a reference, and it "may" be one of those "wonderful" apocryphal quotes. When Alan was writing his article, he again queried Peter, and again Peter said much the same thing.

Another quoted source is from Clifton Fadiman, New Yorker critic who hosted the 1940 radio show "Back Where I Come From" which introduced Woody Guthrie to a national audience. Alas, Clifton wrote about Sigmund and his cigar in 1985.

Alan found a promising lead when he learned some people claimed Sigmund made the statement during his famous 1905 lectures at Clark University. But the "remembering" once more was not until the 1960's and was purely a verbal attribution. No published records of the lectures have mentioned the quote at all.

Perhaps Alan's most instructive finding is when he heard the quote from psychologist Michael Gold. Alan asked for his source, and Michael said he heard it from pscyhologist Harvey Mindless. When Alan asked Harvey, Harvey said he heard it from Michael.

So what do we have? No one seems to find Sigmund's famous cigar quote before the 1960's. It just appears out of the blue with no documentation; the hallmark, we point out, of the urban legend. So the inescapable conclusion is the quote is bogus. People no doubt will continue to circulate the story as authentic and get quite huffy if challenged. Some people should also 1) learn to critically evaluate information and 2) get a life.

The most likely source of the quote is - particularly given the wording of Peter's first citation - that it's a transference of words from Rudyard Kipling's poem Betrothed from "Plain Tales from the Hills", (Oxford University Press, 1987, original edition, 1888). There the reader finds the memorable but rather chauvinistic lines:

A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke;
And a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke.

Now what would Mrs. Freud have said about that, Sigmund?