Psychoanalysis After Freud: A Response to Frederick Crews and other Critics by Glen O. Gabbard, Sheldon M. Goodman, and Arnold D. Richards

It has often been maintained that Galileo became the father of modern science by replacing the speculative deductive method with the empirical, experimental method. I believe, however, that this interpretation would not stand close scrutiny. There is no empirical method without speculative concepts and systems; and there is no speculative thinking whose concepts do not reveal, on closer investigation, the empirical material from which they stem.

Psychoanalysis and its founder Sigmund Freud have never wanted for outspoken critics. Among the most notable of those laying claim to this mantle are Adolf Grünbaum (1984, 1987), Jeffrey Masson (1984), Frank Sulloway (1979), and Peter Swales (1983). Out of this well-populated thicket emerges the one-time votary turned violent apostate Frederick Crews, professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. The place of the intellectual gadfly is welcome and secure within our tradition as the best defense against the public danger posed by a pseudoscience, a term that Crews applies to psychoanalysis. Crews's characterization of analysis as pseudoscience points to his reliance on—indeed, his enthusiastic embracing of—the philosophical-scientific critique of analysis undertaken by Grünbaum over the past decade. As he stated in 1967, “Tempting as it is to dispose of a complex and disturbing subject by means of ad hominem ridicule, such a method of argument is unworthy of scholars” (p. 43). We wish to respond to Crews's and Grünbaum's major criticisms of analysis without engaging in an argument ad hominem.

Each critic constructs his own Freud according to his own needs. Some critics have concluded that when all is said and done, Freud was symptomatically neurotic, used cocaine to excess, was befuddled and duped by Fliess, was covetous of power and authority, and had an ongoing extramarital affair with his sister-in-law,