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In late 1938, Freud recorded a short message, the only instance where his voice was made available to the public. In this interview he recounted very briefly (one sentence in German, seven in English) the history of the psychoanalytic movement, adding that “resistance was unrelenting.” He concluded by saying that “the struggle [for recognition] was not yet over.” I doubt that even Freud could have anticipated that 60 years later, hostility to psychoanalytic ideas, much of it badly informed, almost all of it venomous, would still be active.
This article will document the extent to which psychoanalysis has been under attack and forced to retreat and the extent to which psychoanalytic ideas have been tested. To a limited extent, I will also indicate which psychoanalytic ideas have been found to be consistent with empirical data and which have not. Although I write as a psychologist, and my observations therefore are largely about the dramatic lessening of importance of psychoanalysis in the training and practice of psychology, I have no doubt that the same effects can also be shown in psychiatry and social welfare. The same societal and scientific forces that demean the utility and validity of psychoanalysis operate throughout all the helping professions.
Until fairly recently, for better or worse, psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic thought dominated American intellectual life. William F. Buckley, Jr., in his newspaper column, “Talking to Each Other,” reported that a survey of citations in the Social Sciences Citation Index for the period 1969-1977 found that Freud was the most frequently cited author, with almost twice as many citations (12,319) as the next most cited writer, Karl Marx (6,807 citations). Obviously, something went terribly wrong because that is no longer the case. Citations to psychoanalytic literature are declining (Friman, Allen, Kerwin, and Lazelere, 1993). A report in the February, 1999, issue of the American Psychologist (Robins, Gosling, and Craik,