Much of CoS is based on Freudian concepts. Lucretia just said he was her favorite shrink. But what if Freud were flat-out wrong?

QUOTES:
(Esterson's claims of) discrepancies, doctored evidence and ap­parent lies within Freud's own accounts of individual cases make for disturbing read­ing...

In fact, Freud erected an appar­ently invulnerable umbrella against criti­cisms of psychoanalytical principles. He characterized such disagreements, from patients or anyone else, as "resistance" and then asserted that instances of such resistance amounted to "actual evidence in favor of the correctness" of his asser­tions. For a long time, this psychoanalytic Catch-22 worked wonders: those who op­posed the methods put forth to heal them and others could be banished, perhaps with a friendly handshake and a knowing smile, as nuts...

Grün­baum dces not claim that the idea of re­pressed memories, for instance, is false. He simply argues that neither Freud nor any of his successors has ever proved a cause-and-effect link between a repressed mem­ory and a later neurosis or a retrieved memory and a subsequent cure...
What he bequeathed was not (despite his arguments to the contrary), nor has yet proved itself to be, a science. Psychoanalysis and all its offshoots may in the final analysis turn out to be no more re­liable than phrenology or mesmerism or any of the countless other pseudosciences that once offered unsubstantiated answers or false solace. Still, the reassurances pro­vided by Freud that our inner lives are rich with drama and hidden meanings would be missed if it disappeared, leaving nothing in its place.
END QUOTE from

http://faculty.washington.edu/vienna/do ... _Freud.htm

Parallels between Freud and Hubbard:

1. Critics of Freud showed "resistance."
Critics of Hubbard were "suppressive."

2. Freud's "research" was sloppy and pre-determined to "prove" his theories. Examination of the written data shows failure to prove results. Same for Hubbard.

3. Freud used cocaine which was legal at the time.
http://druglibrary.org/schaffer/cocaine/freud.htm
Hubbard wrote that he was popping "pinks" and greys," and his son said he used cocaine:
http://www.clambake.org/archive/ronthenut/dope.htm

4. Freud used hypnotism but called it "free association"
http://www.medical-library.net/specialties/framer.html?/specialties/_hypnotherapy.html
Hubbard used hypnotism but altered it, called it "light trance" or reverie and then added the e-meter and called it "auditing"
Both of them wanted to rise above being "mere" hypnotists, which were a dime a dozen.

The excellent essay Possible Origins for Dianetics by Jon Atak lists a number of ideas Elron "squirreled" from Freud:

5. ...Freud insisted that there must be expression of emotion (or "generation of affect" ). Hubbard spoke of "returning" in Dianetics...

6. Both Hubbard and Freud spoke of emotional "charge"
--"emotionally cathected (charged) mental process" (Freud)...
---"emotional charge or energy (Hubbard)

7....Freud also described the "bewildering realization that in one and the same individual there can be several mental groupings". These are described as "valences" or "demon circuits" in Dianetics.

8. Freud was also to describe the division of the personality with his notions of the "id", "ego" and "superego"...

9. ...and with the theory of "transference" which asserts that patients transfer responses especially from parents to later figures of authority or support. This is the basis of Hubbard's valence theory as expressed, for example, through the "ally computation".

10. As with Hubbard, Freud used post-hypnotic suggestion as an analogy for the working of the unconscious mind: "In the familiar condition known as 'post-hypnotic suggestion', a command given under hypnosis is slavishly carried out subsequently in the normal state. This phenomenon affords an admirable example of the influences which the unconscious state can exercise over the conscious one; moreover, it provides a pattern upon which we can account for the phenomena of hysteria." Hubbard asserts: "it was discovered that these 'unconscious' periods ["engrams"] were rather like periods of hypnosis driven home by pain. The patient responded as if the 'unconscious' period had been post-hypnotic suggestion."

11. Freud and Hubbard both attempted to recover "chains" of traumatic memories to relieve emotional "charge". The most recent memory is taken up first, and then progressively earlier memories to the earliest (called the "earlier similar" technique in Scientology).

12. Freud also used a method dubbed "repeater technique" in Hubbard's Dianetics:"...the auditor ... notes carefully without appearing to do so, what phrases the patient chooses and repeats about his ills...
"It was observed that, while the patient was in her states of 'absence' ... she was in the habit of muttering a few words to herself which seemed as though they arose from some train of thought that was occupying her mind. The doctor [Breuer], after getting a report of these words, used to put her into a kind of hypnosis and then repeat them to her so as to induce her to use them as a starting-point." ...

13. Hubbard also accepted that Freud had understood what Hubbard was to call the "time-track": "...he (Freud) said that the body contains some sort of a record or blueprint of its immediate past." (26).

Hubbard acknowledged Freud in several places: "The early part of Freud's work back around 1894 was good and we can use it. His equation 'Full recall equals full sanity,' whether he realized it or not, was the key that unlocked the door.". "his tenet of longing for the womb stated clearly that there must be memory associated with them ['prenatal incidents']." "Freud ... did discover that there was possibly some coordination between mental reaction or mental experience and psychosomatic illnesses stemming from the mind." "It is true that Dianetics has a debt to pay to Freud" . "Sigmund Freud stressed traumatic pre-natal incidents ... Forgotten incidents were postulated by Sigmund Freud, to whom through Commander Thompson, one of his students and the friend and mentor of my youth, I am much endebted, to be a considerable factor in human sanity." However (later), Hubbard was also to deny Freud: "As a matter of fact,...Breuer... and Korzybski belong the only acknowledgments that Dianetics really would care to make...
END selected QUOTES from
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/j/origins6.html

My comment: Much of Elron's early certainty in his techniques and their "scientific proof" probably came from the 20th Century popular belief that Freud was "proven" and "right." Many people still "believe" in Freud. As recently as 1999 there was a movie about a Freudian uncovering the repressed emotions of a mob boss. It's called Analyze This with Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal. (the sequel Analyze That is forthcoming). Alfred Hitchcock, M*A*S*H, and even Star Trek: Next Generation had repressed-memory plots. And many Woody Allen movies showed Woody and others on the couch in homage (okay, sarcastic homage) to Freud. But what if Freud's ideas were cool and fun and "good Hollywood drama" but totally untrue? It weakens Hubbard's claims even further.

More Freud debunking - QUOTE:
As distinguished a scientist as Peter Medawar declared in a 1975 intemperate outburst that ‘the opinion is gaining ground that doctrinaire psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century: and a terminal product as well ­ something akin to a dinosaur or a zeppelin in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity.’

http://www.ipa.org.uk/newsletter/98-1/wallerst.htm

This link led me to a book by Edward Dolnick debunking Freud,
Madness on the Couch: Blaming the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis.
QUOTE:
Psychiatry had been an established profession since roughly 1800.What was Freud’s contribution? What did psychoanalysis add to psychiatry?

These were questions Freud was happy to answer. He began by damning psychiatry as he had found it. “It was purely descriptive,” Freud told a lecture audience in 1915, and therefore scarcely deserve(d) the name of a science.”
END QUOTE from
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... eader-link

Amazon.com thoughtfully provides, free to the Internet, a long sample of this book. I highly recommend it - Freud's disdainful attitude toward other people, the narcissism, blaming the victim, damning psychiatry, the claim that everything fell under his new theory, the claiming of greatness rivaling Newton... God, I can see where Elron got his smugness, self-puffery, and most of his ideas. Read dozens of pages (just keep clicking next page)starting here. All you Freud fans, try a little skepticism!

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... eader-link

Don Carlo, et al

Have you tried some source material before going into agreements with critics? Suggest "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life", even in translation itsa goodie.

MY criticism of Freud is that he was unaware of just what truth he had discovered and thereafter failed to do the greatest good for the greatest number.

What he discovered and based his theories for a talk cure on after Anna O showed him how that could work was a thing labelled in psycho-babble today as "the dysfunctional family."

What he FAILED to notice was that the abberations don't fit all dysfunctional families, but they DO tend to fit like a glove when you are cataloging behavioral abnorms in a household headed by a Medical Doctor. Even closer to bingo when the partner is a Registered Nurse.

I can forgive Siggie this blunder because nursing for pay was a fairly new thing for women, even though he ought to have been able to look around at home for a lot of the other stuff, his own father being "one of those" medical doctors, too.

Even that is understandable, given a 17-year-long engagement to the gal of his dreams at a time when you didn't just move in with your honey to see if you could get along BEFORE those social contracts went into full force. The reason the analyst sits behind the patients head when the patient is on the couch is so the patient can't see the doodles the doc is making on the notepad. Some would get an X rating. Siggie's might pass PG, being the good Jewish boy that he was.

So leave my Siggie alone, he done what he had to do to make a young gal happy, establishing himself as a breadwinner and famous person type.

Benjamin Franklin, whom no body ever seems to argue is not a genius, would agree with me on this, IMO, even if he would also have thought Siggie was an idiot for waitng, just 'cause he himself never did.

See Franklin's essay, Advice to a Young Man on Choosing A Mistress. They wouldn't even run the original bio someone mocked up on Benjie during our U.S.A. Bi-Centennial, it was too dicey told straight out, so several million viewers were denied the pleasure of meeting the REAL Ben Franklin, genius-inventor-revolutionary-statesman-ambassador-rake-etc.

Lucretia MacEvil

(Don Carlo, I TOLD you guys not to get me started on Siggie. Did you listen? )

OOPS, there's a 2nd Q here ...

IMO: No, LRH did not admire Siggie because he was a cheat and an imposter. I don't think he really admired him all that much at all, just listed him with other folks he ripped off for the sake of form in DMSMH.

And in 1950, he had just raided the larders of the best and the brightest, many safely dead for centuries and tedious to read in translation. He was still overtly acknowledging many of them with examples no one could mistake for his own creation who was acquainted with the source material as late as -- rats, tapes are in storage too. Philadelphia series. Comparing apples and apples. Count K, expanded axiom

A2002 1:58pm ¹ A2002 2:02pm

The book recommended above could be republished as "Freudian Slips: A New Slant on Psychoanalysis" and probably hit the top of the best-seller lists with a little editing to bring slang and some situations into present time. Wish I had the time to do that ... royalties are another type of income this scumbag org on my keester can't garnish ...

In college I read "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life" and "Interpretation of Dreams," back when the main critics of Freud were the Behaviorists, and Freud was assumed to be truthful and honest. But if Freud has been proven to falsify and overstate his work, and hide his failures, his work is not reliable as proof of his effectiveness.

Sure he had to make a living. But he didn't have to lie. He was a gifted listener and talk therapist; he could have kept his family fed and still been honest. Many people are inspired by his quasi-religious tone and sweeping statements of revealed "truth." But can what he says be proven or disproven? No, and that makes him no scientist.

Here is an excerpt from his "Civilization and Its Discontents." It sounds so noble and grand, but so what? His talk therapy has been used for many decades and cost patients millions, but did it improve civilization? Such a Hubbard-like grandiose smugness. Spare me.


http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393301583/ref=lib_rd_next_7/002-8591145-8608064?v=glance&s=books&vi=reader&img=7#reader-link

Someone (does anybody remember who?) said Scientology should be judged as a massive work of self-serving statements and fiction-writing by Elron. Perhaps Freudian psychotherapy, with its dramatized moments of insight and its supposed breakthroughs, should also be judged as a massive work of self-serving statements and fiction-writing by Freud.

I was once a fan of Freud's, back in my gullible teens and twenties, but not anymore. Perhaps Elron didn't see Freud as a fraud, but I do think he was attracted by the snoopy questions about sex, the grandiose proclamations, the sloppy approach to keeping records, the condescending attitude toward ordinary patients, and the $$$ to be made off those patients. Freud may have been Ron's original role model for being a flim-flam artist.

All true, Don Carlo, but so is what I said about his discoveries.

Siggie missed the withholds of his peers right and left not realizing what he had.

Wouldn't you think that with all those guys gunning for him, the all this "disproof" would have been on the line sooner than, what is it, 30 years maybe? AFTER psychoanalysis was dead as a viable discipline for any practical purpose?

And yet even today, from GPs to shrinks, as almost every doc studies some abnormal psych as part of basic pathology instruction, everyone still has to kick Freud in the balls. I found that fascinating. Especially in light of what was dne with Skinner's basic work, turning it upside down in PRACTICE.

Being enamored with the romance of psychoanalysis in the tween years (18-22 or so) makes sense. If you have any problems you can't resolve with psychoanalysis AFTER that, you are usually in serious trouble.

I personally found behavior mod (based on reward rather than punishment), cognitive therapies like gestalt, bio-feedback techniques, and NLP which is a really REALLY scary thing to contemplate in the hands of an abuser, to be more useful than Freud's METHODS.

Ah, yes.

One serious Q I overlooked:

What did psychoanalysis add to psychiatry?

A little humanity. Not much. But more than Freud will ever get proper credit for. Especially with a credit-hog like LRH chasing after that distnction.

AND of course all the hoopla about his theoories and methods, etc., made the subject interesting to a broader group, which has grown, and which for better or for worse influences TREATMENTS that are allowed, forced, or forsaken by docs and patients alike.