Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939)

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FREUD, SIGMUND
(1856–1939)

Sigmund Freud was the father of psychoanalysis, but—contrary to much apocryphal lore that dies hard—certainly not the originator of the hypothesis that unconscious ideation is essential to explain much of human overt behavior.

The generic doctrine of an unconscious domain of the mind has a venerable, long pre-Freudian history. Indeed, many of the most important doctrines commonly credited to Freud as his creations were tenets of his intellectual patrimony. Thus, as we recall from Plato's dialogue The Meno, Plato was concerned to understand how an ignorant slave boy could have arrived at geometric truths under mere questioning by an interlocutor with reference to a diagram. Plato argued that the slave boy had not acquired such geometric knowledge during his life. Instead, he explained, the boy was tapping prenatal but unconsciously stored knowledge, and restoring it to his conscious memory.

At the turn of the eighteenth century, Gottfried W. Leibniz gave psychological arguments for the occurrence of subthreshold sensory perceptions and for the existence of unconscious mental contents or motives that manifest themselves in our behavior (Ellenberger 1970). Moreover, in his New Essays on Human Understanding (1981), Leibniz pointed out that when the contents of some forgotten experiences subsequently emerge in our consciousness, we may misidentify them as new experiences, rather than recognize them as having been unconsciously stored in our memory.

Historically, it is more significant that Freud also had other precursors who anticipated some of his key ideas with impressive specificity. As he himself acknowledged ([the abbreviation "S.E." will be used to refer to the Standard Edition of Freud's complete psychological works in English] S.E., 1914, 14:15–16), Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche had speculatively propounded major psychoanalytic doctrines that he himself reportedly developed independently from his clinical observations only thereafter. Indeed, in a 1995 German book, Die Flucht ins Vergessen: Die Anfänge der Psychoanalyse Freuds bei Schopenhaeur, the Swiss psychologist Marcel Zentner traces the foundations of psychoanalysis to the philosophy of Schopenhauer.

But, as Freud then pointed out illuminatingly, it is one of the greatest threats to human self-esteem to face that "the [human conscious] ego is not master in its own house " (S.E., 1917, 17:143; emphasis in original). On the other hand, it is evasive to dismiss substantive criticisms of Freudian theory as being due to fears induced by psychoanalytic accounts of presumed unconscious motivations. Such a dismissal does not address the merits of the strictures directed against psychoanalysis.

Freud was born in Freiberg, Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1856. But when he was three years old, his family moved to Vienna, where he entered the University of Vienna in 1873 to study medicine. He lived there until he was expelled by the Nazis, when he moved to London, where he died in 1939.

It is important to distinguish between the validity of Freud's work qua psychoanalytic theoretician, and the merits of his earlier work. The zealous Freudian partisan Mark Solms has edited and translated a presumably forthcoming four-volume series, The Complete Neuroscientific Works of Sigmund Freud. One focus of these writings is the neurological representation of mental functioning; another is Freud's supposed discovery of the essential morphological and physiological unity of the nerve cell and fiber.

They also contain contributions to the histology of the nerve cell, neuronal function, and neurophysiology. As a clinical neurologist, Freud wrote a monograph on aphasia (Solms and Saling, 1990). As Solms claims furthermore in his preview An Introduction to the Neuro-Scientific Works of Sigmund Freud (unpublished), Freud wrote major papers on cerebral palsy that earned him the status of a world authority. And he was a distinguished pediatric neurologist in the field of the movement disorders of childhood. Besides, Freud did scientific work on the properties of cocaine that benefited perhaps from his own use of that drug. Alas, that elating intake may well also account for some of the abandon featured by the more bizarre and grandiose of his psychoanalytic forays.

In 1880, he published a (free) translation of some of John Stuart Mill's philosophical writings. Yet, as Paul-Laurent Assoun notes in his 1995 Freud, La Philosophie, et les Philosophes, Freud was often disdainful of philosophy, despite clearly being indebted to the Viennese philosopher Franz Brentano, from whom he had taken several courses. The marks of Brentano's quondam representationalist and intentionalist account of the mental in the 1995 edition of his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint are clearly discernible in Freud's conception of ideation. And the arguments for the existence of God championed by the quondam Roman Catholic priest Brentano further solidified the thoroughgoing atheism of Freud, who has been called a "godless Jew " (Gay, 1987, pp. 3–4; Grünbaum, 1993, ch. 7).

Psychoanalysis

The most basic ideas of psychoanalytic theory were initially enunciated in Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud's Preliminary Communication of 1893, which introduced their Studies on Hysteria. But the first published use of the word psychoanalysis occurred in Freud's 1896 French paper on Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses (S.E., 1896, 3:151). Therein Freud designated Breuer's method of clinical investigation as "a new method of psychoanalysis." Astonishingly, the coauthored 1893 prolegomenon, which lays bare the logical foundation of the cornerstone theory of repression, has been overlooked and untutoredly neglected in the literature, both psychoanalytic and philosophical. Breuer used hypnosis to revive and articulate a patient's unhappy memory of a supposedly repressed traumatic experience. The repression of that painful experience had occasioned the first appearance of a particular hysterical symptom, such as a phobic aversion to drinking water. Thus, Freud's mentor also induced the release of the suppressed emotional distress originally felt from the trauma. Thereby Breuer's method provided a catharsis for the patient.

The cathartic lifting of the repression yielded relief from the particular hysterical symptom. Breuer and Freud (1893) believed that they could therefore hypothesize that the repression, coupled with affective suppression, was the crucial cause for the development of the patient's psychoneurosis (S.E., 1893, 2:6–7; 3:29–31).

Having reasoned in this way, they concluded, in Freud's later words: "Thus one and the same procedure served simultaneously the purposes of [causally] investigating and of getting rid of the ailment; and this unusual conjunction was later retained in psycho-analysis" (S.E., 1924, 19:194).

In his 1924 historical retrospect, Freud acknowledged the pioneering role of Breuer's cathartic method: "The cathartic method was the immediate precursor of psychoanalysis; and, in spite of every extension of experience and of every modification of theory, is still contained within it as its nucleus" (S.E., 1924, 19:194).

Yet Freud was careful to highlight the contribution he made himself after the termination of his collaboration with Breuer. Referring to himself in the third person, he tells us: "Freud devoted himself to the further perfection of the instrument left over to him by his elder collaborator. The technical novelties which he introduced and the discoveries he made changed the cathartic method into psycho-analysis" (S.E. 1924, 19:195). Later on, Freud regarded repressed wishes rather than forgotten traumata as the principal pathogens of neuroses. These extensive elaborations have earned him the mantle of being the father of psychoanalysis.

It is important to recognize that there are major differences between the unconscious processes hypothesized by current cognitive psychology, on the one hand, and the unconscious contents of the mind claimed by psychoanalytic psychology, on the other (Eagle, 1987). These divergences are such that the existence of the cognitive unconscious clearly fails to support, if not impugns, the existence of Freud's "dynamic" unconscious.

His so-called dynamic unconscious is the supposed repository of repressed forbidden wishes of a sexual or aggressive nature, whose reentry or initial entry into consciousness is prevented by the defensive operations of the ego-agency of the mind. Though socially unacceptable, these instinctual desires are so imperious and peremptory that they recklessly seek immediate gratification, independently of the constraints of external reality.

But, in the cognitive unconscious, there is great rationality in the ubiquitous computational and associative problem-solving processes required by memory, perception, judgment, and attention. By contrast, as Freud emphasized, the wish-content of the dynamic unconscious makes it operate in a highly illogical way.

Having populated the dynamic unconscious with repressions, Freud reasoned that the use of his new technique of free association could lift these repressions of instinctual wishes, and could thereby bring the banished ideas back to consciousness unchanged. But in the case of the cognitive unconscious, we typically cannot bring to phenomenal consciousness the intellectual processes that are presumed to occur in it, although we can describe them theoretically. For example, even if his/her life depended on it, a student of czarist history simply could not bring into his/her phenomenal conscious experience the elaborate scanning or search process by which he/she rapidly comes up with the name of the Russian czarina's confidant G.Y. Rasputin, when asked for it. In sum, the presumed psychoanalytic unconscious as such cannot derive any credibility from the hypothesized cognitive unconscious.

Psychoanalysis and Western Culture

The poet W.H. Auden claimed that psychoanalysis is a whole climate of opinion. And indeed, it has been argued dubiously that the supposed pervasive influence of Freudian ideas in our culture vouches for the validity of the psychoanalytic enterprise. But even the premise that Freudian theory has become part of the intellectual ethos and folklore of Western culture cannot be taken at face value. As the distinguished Swiss scholar Henri Ellenberger stressed in his major historical work of 1970 The Discovery of the Unconscious, the prevalence of vulgarized pseudo-Freudian concepts makes it very difficult to determine reliably the extent to which genuine psychoanalytic hypotheses have actually become influential in our culture at large.

For example, any slip of the tongue or other bungled action (parapraxis) is typically yet incorrectly called a Freudian slip. But, as Freud himself pointed out, what is required for a slip or so-called parapraxis to qualify technically as Freudian is that it be motivationally opaque rather than transparent, precisely because its psychological motive is repressed (S.E., 1916–1917, 15: 41). Once it is clear what is meant by a bona fide Freudian slip, we need to ask whether there actually exist any such slips at all, that is, slips that appear to be psychologically unmotivated but are actually caused by repressed, unpleasant ideas. It is very important to appreciate how difficult it is to provide cogent evidence for such causation, as shown by strenuous attempts to furnish it experimentally.

Thus, as long as good empirical support for the Freudian scenario is unavailable, we actually do not know whether any bona fide Freudian slips exist at all. Just this lack of evidence serves to undermine the thesis that cultural influence is a criterion of validity. After all, if we have no cogent evidence for the existence of genuinely Freudian slips, then Freud's theory of bungled actions (parapraxes) might well be false. And if so, it would not contribute one iota to its validity even if our entire culture unanimously believed in it and made extensive explanatory use of it: When an ill-supported theory is used to provide explanations, they run the grave risk of being bogus, and its purported insights may well be pseudo-insights.

The Cornerstone of Psychoanalysis

In his 1914 On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, Freud wrote: "The theory of repression is the cornerstone on which the whole structure of psychoanalysis rests. It is the most essential part of it" (S.E., 1914, 14:16) The pillars of the avowed cornerstone of Freud's theoretical edifice comprise several major theses: (1) Distressing mental states induce the operation of a psychic mechanism of repression, which consists in the banishment from consciousness of unpleasurable psychic states (S.E., 1915, 14:147); (2) once repression is operative (more or less fully), it not only banishes such negatively charged ideas from consciousness, but plays a further crucial multiple causal role: It is causally necessary for the pathogenesis of neuroses, the production of our dreams, and the generation of our various sorts of slips (bungled actions); and (3) the method of free association can identify and lift (undo) the patient's repressions; by doing so, it can identify the pathogens of the neuroses, and the generators of our dreams, as well as the causes of our motivationally opaque slips; moreover, by lifting the pathogenic repressions, free association also functions therapeutically, rather than only investigatively.

Freud provided two sorts of arguments for his cardinal etiologic doctrine that repressions are the pathogens of the neuroses: His earlier one, which goes back to his original collaboration with Josef Breuer, relies on purported therapeutic successes from lifting repressions; the later one, designed to show that the pathogenic repressions are sexual, is drawn from presumed reenactments (transferences) of infantile episodes in the adult patient's interactions with the analyst during psychoanalytic treatment. The process of repression, which consists in the banishment of ideas from consciousness or in denying them entry into it, is itself presumed to be unconscious (S.E., 1915, 14:147). In Freud's view, our neurotic symptoms, the manifest contents of our dreams, and the slips we commit are each constructed as "compromises between the demands of a repressed impulse and the resistances of a censoring force in the ego" (S.E., 1925, 20:45; and 1916–1917, 16:301).

By being only such compromises, rather than fulfillments of the instinctual impulses, these products of the unconscious afford only substitutive gratifications or outlets. For brevity, one can say, therefore, that Freud has offered a unifying compromise model of neuroses, dreams, and parapraxes. Since the repressed impulse made a compromise with the repressing ego, compromise-formations are products of unsuccessful repressions!

But what, in the first place, is the motive or cause that initiates and sustains the operation of the unconscious mechanism of repression before it produces its own later effects? Apparently, Freud assumes axiomatically that distressing mental states, such as forbidden wishes, traumata, disgust, anxiety, anger, shame, hate, guilt, and sadness—all of which are unpleasurable—almost always actuate, and then fuel, forgetting to the point of repression. Thus, repression regulates pleasure and so called "unpleasure" or displeasure by defending our consciousness against various sorts of negative affect. Indeed, Freud claimed perennially that repression is the paragon among our defense mechanisms. As he put it dogmatically: "The tendency to forget what is disagreeable seems to me to be a quite universal one" (S.E., 1901, 6:144), and "The recollection of distressing impressions and the occurrence of distressing thoughts are opposed by a resistance" (S.E., 1901, 6:146).

Freud tries to disarm an important objection to his thesis that "distressing memories succumb especially easily to motivated forgetting". He says:

The assumption that a defensive trend of this kind exists cannot be objected to on the ground that one often enough finds it impossible, on the contrary, to get rid of distressing memories that pursue one, and to banish distressing affective impulses like remorse and the pangs of conscience. For we are not asserting that this defensive trend is able to put itself into effect in every case.
(S.E., 1901, 6:147, italics added).

He acknowledges as "also a true fact" that "distressing things are particularly hard to forget" (S.E., 1916–1917, 15:76–77).

Indeed, Freud himself told us as an adult that he "can remember very clearly," from age seven or eight, how his father rebuked him for having relieved himself in the presence of his parents in their bedroom. In a frightful blow to the boy's ego, his father said: "The boy will come to nothing" (S.E., 1900, 4:216).

But Freud's attempt here to uphold his thesis of motivated forgetting is evasive and unavailing: Since some painful mental states are vividly remembered, while others are forgotten or even repressed, it appears that factors different from their painfulness determine whether they are remembered or forgotten. For example, personality dispositions or situational variables may in fact be causally relevant. To the great detriment of his theory, Freud never came to grips with the unfavorable bearing of this key fact about the mnemonic effects of painfulness on the tenability of the following pillar of his theory of repression: When painful or forbidden experiences are forgotten, the forgetting is tantamount to their repression due to their negative affect, and thereby produces neurotic symptoms or other compromise formations.

The numerous and familiar occurrences of vivid and even obsessive recall of negative experiences pose a fundamental statistical and explanatory challenge to Freud that neither he nor his followers have ever met. Astonishingly, Freud thinks he can parry this basic statistical and explanatory challenge by an evasive dictum, as follows: "Mental life is the arena and battle-ground for mutually opposing purposes [of forgetting and remembering] (S.E. 1916–1917, 15:76) …; there is room for both. It is only a question … of what effects are produced by the one and the other" (S.E., 1916–1917, 15: 77). Indeed, just that question cries out for an answer from Freud if he is to make his case. Instead, he cavalierly left it to dangle epistemologically in limbo.

Freud's argument here is an evasive attempt to neutralize the ubiquitous refuting instances undermining his aforecited claim (S.E., 1901, 6:144) that "The tendency to forget what is disagreeable seems to me to be a quite universal one." And he tries to do so by peremptorily inventing ad hoc an opposing tendency to remember negatively charged experiences. But since this gambit clearly fails, he has forfeited his basis for his pivotal etiologic scenario that forbidden or aversive states of mind are usually repressed and thereby cause compromise formations, such as neurotic symptoms.

Unsuccessful Repressions as Pathogens of the Psychoneuroses

Let us articulate and scrutinize Breuer and Freud's 1893 argument, in their foundational Preliminary Communication, for the pathogenicity of unsuccessful repressions. There they wrote:

For we found, to our great surprise at first, that each individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was provoked and in arousing its accompanying affect, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words. Recollection without affect almost invariably produces no result. The psychical process which originally took place must be repeated as vividly as possible; it must be brought back to its status nascendi and then given verbal utterance.
(S.E., 1893, 2:6–7).

Breuer and Freud make an important comment on their construal of this therapeutic finding:

It is plausible to suppose that it is a question here of unconscious suggestion: the patient expects to be relieved of his sufferings by this procedure, and it is this expectation, and not the verbal utterance, which is the operative factor. This, however, is not so. (S.E., 1893, 2:7)

And their avowed reason is that, in 1881, that is, in the "'pre-suggestion' era," the cathartic method was used to remove separately distinct symptoms, "which sprang from separate causes" such that any one symptom disappeared only after the cathartic (abreactive) lifting of a particular repression. But Breuer and Freud do not tell us why the likelihood of a placebo effect should be deemed to be lower when several symptoms are wiped out seriatim, than in the case of getting rid of only one symptom. Thus, as is pointed out in Grünbaum (1993), to discredit the hypothesis of placebo effect, it would have been essential to have comparisons with treatment outcome from a suitable control group whose repressions are not lifted. If that control group were to fare equally well, treatment gains from psychoanalysis would then be placebo effects after all.

In sum, Breuer and Freud inferred that the therapeutic removal of neurotic symptoms was produced by the cathartic lifting of the patient's previously ongoing repression of the pertinent traumatic memory, not by the therapist's suggestion or some other placebo factor (see Grünbaum 1993). This claim can be codified as follows:

T. Therapeutic Hypothesis : Lifting repressions of traumatic memories cathartically is causally relevant to the disappearance of neuroses.

As we saw, Breuer and Freud (S.E., 1893, 2:6) reported the immediate and permanent disappearance of each hysterical symptom after they cathartically lifted the repression of the memory of the trauma that occasioned the given symptom. They adduce this "evidence" to draw an epoch-making inductive etiologic inference, which postulates "a causal relation between the determining [repression of the memory of the] psychical trauma and the hysterical phenomenon" (S.E., 1893, 2:6). Citing the old scholastic dictum Cessante causa cessat effectus (When the cause ceases, its effect ceases), they invoke its contrapositive (S.E., 1893, 2:7), which states that as long as the effect (symptom) persists, so does its cause (the repressed memory of the psychical trauma). And they declare just that to be the pattern of the pathogenic action of the repressed psychical trauma. This trauma, we learn, is not a mere precipitating cause. Such a mere "agent provocateur" just releases the symptom, "which thereafter leads an independent existence." Instead, "the [repressed] memory of the trauma … acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at work" (S.E., 1893, 2:6).

The upshot of their account is that their observations of positive therapeutic outcome from the abreactive lifting of repressions, which they interpret in the sense of their therapeutic hypothesis, spelled a paramount etiologic moral as follows:

E. Etiologic Hypothesis : An ongoing repression accompanied by affective suppression is causally necessary for the initial pathogenesis and persistence of a neurosis.

Clearly, this etiologic hypothesis E permits the valid deduction of the therapeutic finding reported by Breuer and Freud as codified in their therapeutic hypothesis T : The cathartic lifting of the repressions of traumatic memories of events that occasion symptoms engendered the disappearance of the symptoms. And, as they told us explicitly (S.E., 1893, 2:6), this therapeutic finding is their evidence for their cardinal etiologic hypothesis E.

But this inductive argument is vitiated by what might be called the fallacy of crude hypothetico-deductive (H-D) pseudo-confirmation. Thus, note that the remedial action of aspirin consumption for tension headaches does not lend H-D support to the outlandish etiologic hypothesis that a hematolytic aspirin deficiency is a causal sine qua non for having tension headaches, although such remedial action is validly deducible from that bizarre hypothesis.

Wesley Salmon called attention to the fallacy of inductive causal inference from mere valid H-D deducibility by giving an example in which a deductively valid pseudo-explanation of a man's avoiding pregnancy can readily give rise to an H-D pseudo-confirmation of the addle-brained attribution of his nonpregnancy to his consumption of birth control pills. Salmon, in his coauthored 1971 book Statistical Explanation and Statistical Relevance, states the fatuous pseudo-explanation:

John Jones avoided becoming pregnant during the past year, for he had taken his wife's birth control pills regularly, and every man who regularly takes birth control pills avoids pregnancy. (p. 34)

Plainly, this deducibility of John Jones's recent failure to become pregnant from the stated premises does not lend any credence at all to the zany hypothesis that this absence of pregnancy is causally attributable to his consumption of birth control pills. Yet it is even true that any men who consume such pills in fact never do become pregnant. Patently, as Salmon notes, the fly in the ointment is that men just do not become pregnant, whether they take birth control pills or not.

His example shows that neither the empirical truth of the deductively inferred conclusion and of the pertinent initial condition concerning Jones nor the deductive validity of the inference can provide bona fide confirmation of the causal hypothesis that male consumption of birth control pills prevents male pregnancy: That hypothesis would first have to meet other epistemic requirements, which it manifestly cannot do.

Crude H-D confirmationism is a paradise of spurious causal inferences, as illustrated by Breuer and Freud's unsound etiologic inference. Thus, psychoanalytic narratives are replete with the belief that a hypothesized etiologic scenario embedded in a psychoanalytic narrative of an analysand's affliction is made credible merely because the postulated etiology then permits the logical deduction or probabilistic inference of the neurotic symptoms to be explained.

The Psychoanalytic Method of Clinical Investigation by Free association: Is it Both Investigative and Therapeutic?

This method, the so-called "Fundamental Rule" of clinical investigation in the setting of psychoanalytic treatment, is the supposed microscope, and even X-ray tomograph, as it were, of the human mind. Freud devised it, when he became dissatisfied with the use of hypnosis, which Breuer and he had employed theretofore as their probe.

The rule of free association directs the patient to tell the analyst without reservation whatever comes to mind. Thus, it serves as the fundamental method of clinical investigation. We are told that by using this technique to unlock the floodgates of the unconscious, Freud was able to show that neuroses, dreams, and slips are caused by repressed motives. Just as in Breuer's cathartic use of hypnosis, it is a cardinal thesis of Freud's entire psychoanalytic enterprise that his method of free association has a twofold major capability, which is both investigative and therapeutic: (1) It can identify the unconscious causes of human thoughts and behavior, both abnormal and normal; and (2) by overcoming resistances and lifting repressions, it can remove the unconscious pathogens of neuroses and thus provide therapy for an important class of mental disorders.

But on what grounds did Freud assert that free association has the stunning investigative capability to be causally probative for etiologic research in psychopathology? Is it not too good to be true that one can put a psychologically disturbed person on the couch and fathom the etiology of her or his affliction by free association? As compared to fathoming the causation of major somatic diseases, that seems almost miraculous, if true at all. Freud tells us very clearly (S.E., 1900, 5:528) that his argument for his investigative tribute to free association as a means of uncovering the causation of neuroses is, at bottom, a therapeutic one going back to the cathartic method of treating hysteria.

In a nutshell, his argument for claiming that free associations are causally probative for etiologic research in psychopathology, as well as vehicles of therapy, is as follows: (1) As he and Breuer had contended, unsuccessful repressions are the pathogens of the psychoneuroses; (2) The supposedly free associations departing from the patient's neurotic symptoms uncover the pertinent repressions; (3) Hence the method of free associations can identify the pathogenic repressions, and in so doing, it lifts them and thereby provides therapy for the neurosis and its symptoms. But it behooves us to expand this argument with a view to then seeing why it fails in several respects, no matter how revealing the associative contents may otherwise be in regard to the patient's psychological preoccupations and personality dispositions.

Drawing on his joint work with Breuer, Freud first inferred that the therapeutic disappearance of the neurotic symptoms is causally attributable to the cathartic lifting of repressions by means of the method of free association. Relying on this key therapeutic hypothesis, he then drew two further major theoretical inferences: (1) The seeming removal of the neurosis by means of cathartically lifting repressions is good inductive evidence for postulating that repressions accompanied by affective suppression are themselves causally necessary for the very existence of a neurosis (S.E., 1893, 2:6–7), and (2) granted that such repressions are thus the essential causes of neurosis, and that the method of free association is uniquely capable of uncovering these repressions, this method is uniquely competent to identify the causes or pathogens of the neuroses.

But the argument fails for the following several reasons. In the first place, the durable therapeutic success on which it was predicated did not materialize, as Freud was driven to admit both relatively early and very late in his career (S.E., 1925, 20:27; 1937, 23:216–253). And indeed, over a century later, three currently practicing English psychoanalysts, (Fonagy et al., 2005, p. 367) conceded ruefully: "Notwithstanding a history of over 100 years, psychoanalytically informed psychological therapies have a poor evidence base." But even insofar as Freud achieved transitory therapeutic gain, it will be recalled that he had failed to rule out a rival hypothesis which undermines his attribution of such gain to the lifting of repressions by free association: the ominous rival hypothesis of placebo effect, which asserts that treatment ingredients other than insight into the patient's repressions—such as the mobilization of the patient's hope by the therapist—are responsible for any resulting improvement. (For a detailed account of the placebo concept in both psychiatry and medicine, see Grünbaum, 1993, chap. 3). Nor have other analysts ruled out the placebo hypothesis during the past century.

Last, but not least, the repression etiology is inductively ill-founded, as will be recalled, and will now be seen further. It is unavailing to the purported etiologic probativeness of free associations that they may lift repressions, because Freud failed to show that the latter are pathogenic. In sum, Freud's argument has forfeited its premises.

Long after the Preliminary Communication of 1893, Freud (S.E., 1914, 14:12) offered an argument in his theory of "Transference" for the pathogenic role of repressions, hailing that argument as the most unshakable proof for his sexual etiology of the neuroses. It is a commonplace that many, if not all, adults carry over (transfer) to their adult interactions with other people attitudes and notions that they had acquired in (early) childhood. In this vein, Freud elaborates on this phenomenon in the context of the interpersonal transactions between the psychoanalyst and the patient. Thus, we learn, the patient transfers onto his or her psychoanalyst feelings and thoughts that originally pertained to important figures in his or her earlier life. In this important sense, the fantasies woven around the psychoanalyst by the analysand, and quite generally the latter's conduct toward his or her doctor, are hypothesized to be thematically recapitulatory of childhood episodes. And by thus being recapitulatory, the patient's behavior during treatment can be said to exhibit a thematic kinship to such very early episodes. Therefore, when the analyst interprets these supposed reenactments, the ensuing interpretations are called transference interpretations.

Freud and his followers have traditionally drawn the following highly questionable causal inference: Precisely in virtue of being thematically recapitulated in the patient-doctor interaction, the hypothesized earlier scenario in the patient's life can cogently be held to have originally been a pathogenic factor in the patient's affliction. For example, in his 1909 case history of the "Rat-Man," Freud infers that a certain emotional conflict had originally been the precipitating cause of the patient's inability to work, merely because this conflict had been thematically reenacted in a fantasy the "Rat-Man" had woven around Freud during treatment.

Thus, in the context of Freud's transference interpretations, the thematic reenactment is claimed to show that the early scenario had originally been pathogenic. According to this major etiologic conclusion, the patient's thematic reenactment in the treatment setting is also asserted to be pathogenically recapitulatory by being pathogenic in the adult patient's here and now, rather than only thematically recapitulatory. Freud extols this dubious etiologic transference argument in his On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement (S.E., 1914, 14:12).

On the contrary, the patient's thematically recapitulatory behavior toward his or her doctor does not show that it is also pathogenically recapitulatory. The etiologic belief that it does so commits the "thematic affinity fallacy" (Grünbaum, 1993, p. 129; 2002, p. 134). How, for example, does the reenactment, during treatment, of a patient's early conflict show at all that the original conflict had been pathogenic in the first place? Indeed, it is epistemologically circular to infer the occurrence of infantile episodes from the adult patient's reports, and then to claim that these early episodes are thematically recapitulated in the adult analysand's conduct toward the analyst. Quite generally, how do transference phenomena focusing on the analyst show that a presumed current replica of a past event is pathogenic in the here and now?

Freud went on to build on the quicksand of his etiologic transference argument. It inspired two of his further fundamental tenets: first, the investigative thesis that the psychoanalytic dissection of the patient's behavior toward the analyst can reliably identify the original pathogens of his or her long-term neurosis; second, the cardinal therapeutic doctrine that the working through of the analysand's so-called transference neurosis is the key to overcoming his or her perennial problems.

The Psychoanalytic Theory of Dreaming

As we learn from Freud's opening pages on his method of dream interpretation, he extrapolated the presumed causally probative role of free associations from being only a method of etiologic inquiry aimed at therapy, to serving likewise as an avenue for finding the purported unconscious causes of dreams (S.E., 1900, 4:100–101; 5:528). And in the same breath, he reports that when patients told him about their dreams while associating freely to their symptoms, he extrapolated his compromise model from neurotic symptoms to manifest dream contents. A year later, he carried out the same twofold extrapolation to include slips or bungled actions.

But what do free associations tell us about our dreams? Whatever the manifest content of dreams, they are purportedly wish-fulfilling in at least two logically distinct ways: For every dream D, there exists at least one normally unconscious infantile wish W such that: (1) W is the motivational cause of D ; and (2) the manifest content of D graphically displays, more or less disguisedly, the state of affairs desired by W. As Freud opined: "When the latent dream-thoughts that are revealed by the analysis [via free association] of a dream are examined, one of them is found to stand out from among the rest … the isolated thought is found to be a wishful impulse" (S.E., 1925, 20:44). But as Clark Glymour (1983) has emphasized, Freud manipulated and doctored the free associations to yield a distinguished wish motive. Thus, Freud had declared with categorical universality (S.E. 1900, 4:134) "there cannot be any dreams but wishful [i. e., wish-generated] dreams"

Quite independently of Freud's abortive therapeutic argument for the causal probativeness of free association, he offered his analysis of his 1895 Specimen Irma Dream as a nontherapeutic argument for the method of free association as a cogent means of identifying hypothesized hidden, forbidden wishes to be motives of our dreams. But, in a detailed critique of that unjustly celebrated Irma Dream, it has been shown that Freud's account there is, alas, no more than a piece of false advertising for the following reasons:

It does not deliver at all the promised vindication of the probativeness of free association.
It does nothing toward warranting his foolhardy dogma that all dreams are wish-fulfilling in his stated sense.
It does not even pretend that his alleged "Specimen Dream" is evidence for his compromise model of manifest-dream content.
The inveterate and continuing celebration of Freud's analysis of his "Irma Dream" in the psychoanalytic literature as the paragon of dream interpretation is completely unwarranted, because it is mere salesmanship (Grünbaum 1984, pp. 216–239).

Moreover, careful studies have shown that the so-called free associations are not free but are strongly influenced by the psychoanalyst's subtle promptings to the patient (Grünbaum 1984). And recent memory research has shown further how patients and others can be induced to generate pseudo-memories, which are false but deemed veridical by the patients themselves (Goleman 1994). As a corollary of the latter epistemological defects of the method of free association, it appears that such associations cannot reliably vouch for the contents of presumed past repressions that are lifted by them.

Once Freud had clearly chained himself gratuitously to the universal wish monopoly of dream generation, his interpretations of dreams were constrained to reconcile wish-contravening dreams with the decreed universality of wish fulfillment. Such reconciliation demanded imperiously that all other parts and details of his dream theory be obligingly tailored to the governing wish dogma so as to sustain it. Yet Freud artfully obscured this dynamic of theorizing, while begging the methodological question (S.E., 1900, 4:135). Wish-contravening dreams include anxiety dreams, nightmares, and the so-called counter-wish dreams (S.E., 1900, 4:157). As an example of the latter, Freud reports a trial attorney's dream that he had lost all of his court cases (S.E., 1900, 4:152).

His initial 1900 statement of his dual wish fulfillment in a dream had been: "Thus, its content was the fulfillment of a wish and its motive was a wish" (S.E., 1900, 4:119). But the sense in which dreams are wish fulfilling overall is purportedly threefold rather than only twofold: One supposed motivating cause is the universal preconscious wish to sleep, which allegedly provides a generic causal explanation of dreaming as such and, in turn, makes dreaming the guardian of sleep (S.E., 1900, 4:234; 5:680); another is the individualized repressed infantile wish, which is activated by the day's residue and explains the particular manifest content of a given dream; furthermore, as already noted, that manifest content of the dream graphically displays, more or less disguisedly, the state of affairs desired by the unconscious wish. The disguise is supposedly effected by the defensive operation of the dream distortion of the content of forbidden unconscious wishes.

But this theorized distortion of the hypothesized latent content must not be identified with the very familiar phenomenological bizarreness of the manifest dream content! By achieving a compromise with the repressed wishes, the postulated distortion makes "plausible that even dreams with a distressing content are to be construed as wish fulfillments" (S.E., 1900, 4:159). Accordingly, Freud concedes: "The fact that dreams really have a secret meaning which represents the fulfillment of a wish must be proved afresh in each particular case by analysis" (S.E., 1900, 4:146).

The Hermeneutic Reconstruction of Psychoanalysis

In concert with the so-called hermeneutic German philosophers Karl Jaspers and Jürgen Habermas, the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur believed that victory can be snatched from the jaws of the scientific failings of Freud's theory by abjuring his scientific aspirations as misguided. Claiming pejoratively that Freud himself had "scientistically" misunderstood his own theoretical achievement, some hermeneuts misconstrue it as a semantic accomplishment by trading on the multiply ambiguous word meaning (Grünbaum 1999, 2002).

In Freud's theory, an overt symptom manifests one or more underlying unconscious causes and gives evidence for its cause(s), so that the sense or meaning of the symptom is constituted by its latent motivational cause(s). But this notion of meaning is different from the one appropriate to the context of communication, in which linguistic symbols acquire semantic meaning by being used deliberately to designate their referents. Clearly, the relation of being a manifestation, which the symptom bears to its cause, differs from the semantic relation of designation, which a linguistic symbol bears to its object.

The hermeneutic reconstruction of psychoanalysis slides illicitly from one of two familiar senses of the term "meaning" encountered in ordinary discourse to another. When a pediatrician says that a child's spots on the skin mean measles, the meaning of the symptom is constituted by one of its causes, much as in the Freudian case. Yet, when speaking of Freud's making sense of a patient's symptoms, the analyst Anthony Storr (1986) conflates the fathoming of the etiologic sense or meaning of a symptom with the activity of making semantic sense of a text, preposterously transmogrifying Freud into a semanticist: "Freud was a man of genius whose expertise lay in semantics" (p. 260). And Ricoeur even wrongly credits Freud's theory of repression with having provided, malgré lui, a veritable semantics of desire.

Relatedly, John R. Searle has noted illuminatingly in his 1990 book Intentionality that, unlike many mental states, language is not intrinsically intentional in Brentano's directed sense; instead, the intentionality (aboutness) of language is extrinsically imposed on it by deliberately decreeing it to function referentially. Searle points out that the mental states of some animals and of pre-linguistic very young children do have intrinsic intentionality but no linguistic referentiality.

Thus, it is a fundamental hermeneuticist error to slide illicitly from the intrinsic, non-semantic intentionality of (many, but not all) mental states to the imposed, semantic sort possessed by language. Moreover, some of the neurotic symptoms of concern to psychoanalysts, such as diffuse depression and manic, undirected elation even lack Brentano intentionality.

Yet some version of a hermeneutic reconstruction of the psychoanalytic enterprise has been embraced with alacrity by a considerable number of analysts no less than by professors in humanities departments of universities. Its psychoanalytic adherents see it as buying absolution for their theory and therapy from the criteria of validation mandatory for causal hypotheses in the empirical sciences, although psychoanalysis is replete with just such hypotheses. This form of escape from accountability also augurs ill for the future of psychoanalysis, because the methods of the champions of the hermeneutic reconstruction of psychoanalysis have not spawned a single new important hypothesis. Instead, their reconstruction is a negativistic ideological battle cry whose disavowal of Freud's scientific aspirations presages the death of his legacy from sheer sterility, at least among those who demand the validation of theories by cogent evidence.

Freud on Theistic Religion

In his 1933 essay The Question of a Weltanschauung, Freud appraised theism under the label of religion and wrote:

Religion is an attempt to master the sensory world in which we are situated by means of the wished world which we have developed within us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But religion cannot achieve this. Its doctrines bear the imprint of the times in which they arose, the ignorant times of the childhood of humanity. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is no nursery.
(S.E., 1933, 22:168).

And in his 1927 critique of theism entitled The Future of an Illusion, he stresses the logical priority of his atheism vis-à-vis his psychology of theism:

Nothing that I have said here against the truth-value of religions needed the support of psycho-analysis; it had been said by others long before analysis came into existence. If the application of the psycho-analytic method makes it possible to find a new argument against the truths of religion, tant pis [so much the worse] for religion; but defenders of religion will by the same right make use of psycho-analysis in order to give full value to the affective significance of religious doctrines.
(S.E., 1927, 21:37).

This avowed entitlement of religious partisans is presumably an allusion to Freud's friend Oskar Pfister, a Lutheran clergyman and avid champion of the use of psychoanalysis in pastoral work. Relatedly, though, like Freud, also a committed atheist, Karl Marx had expressed sympathy for the quest for solace in the face of the trials and tribulations of life. Marx wrote:

"Religion … is … the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of an unspiritual situation. It is the opium of the people."
(Feuer 1959, p. 523).

Marx's use of the term opium here to characterize the consoling function of religion is descriptive rather than pejorative: In his time, opium was a commonly used anodyne, available without prescription.

Freud maintained that religious beliefs are engendered by the synergism of three significantly different sorts of powerful, relentless wishes. And for each of this trio of wishes, he conjectures a distinct scenario that specifies their content and mode of operation.

As he points out, the first set of these psychogenetic assumptions features wish motives that are largely conscious or manifest, instead of being the repressed wishes postulated by psychoanalytic theory. Accordingly, this component of Freud's triadic psychology of religion does not rely on any of his technical psychoanalytic teachings. But what are the relevant archaic conscious wishes? He explains eloquently in his 1927 book The Future of an Illusion :

… the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protection—for protection through love—which is provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one. Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world-order ensures the fulfillment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilization; and the prolongation of earthly existence in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish-fulfillments shall take place. Answers to the riddles that tempt the curiosity of man, such as how the universe began or what the relation is between body and mind, are developed in conformity with the underlying assumptions of this system
(S.E., 1927, 21:30).

Understandably, therefore, the protector, creator, and lawgiver are all rolled into one. No wonder, says Freud (S.E., 1933, 22:163–164), that in one and the same breath, Immanuel Kant coupled the starry heavens above, and the moral law within as both being awe-inspiring. After all, Freud asks rhetorically, "what have the heavenly bodies to do with the question of whether one human creature loves another or kills him?" And he answers: "The same father (or parental agency) which gave the child life and guarded him against its perils, taught him as well what he might do and what he must leave undone" (S.E., 1933, 22:164).

Insofar as Freud's psychogenetic portrayal of religion depicts it as the product of conscious wishes, his account draws, not only on Ludwig A. Feuerbach, but also on commonsense psychology. After all, at least prima facie, it is rather a commonplace that people seek to avoid anxiety, and that they therefore tend to welcome the replacement of threatening beliefs by reassuring ones. Hence, for brevity, this component of Freud's triadic psychology of religion can be designated as the "commonsense hypothesis," which is not to say, however, that it is obviously true. Each of the other two components of this trinity is a set of psychoanalytic claims, asserting the operation of repressed motives. And yet they differ from each other, because one of them relies on Freud's theory of the psychosexual development of the human individual, while the other consists of ethnopsychological and psychohistorical averrals pertaining to the evolution of our species as a whole. Accordingly, the former psychoanalytic assumptions can be dubbed ontogenetic, while the latter can be labeled phylogenetic.

The legitimacy of any psychogenetic portrait of religious creeds depends on the evidential merit of the explanatory psychological hypotheses adduced by it. Even the commonsense component of Freud's triad is subject to this caveat. Invoking the criticisms of his great predecessors, he took it for granted that there is no cogency in any of the arguments for the existence of God offered by believers. But he coupled this philosophical judgment with the daring motivational claim that the faithful who nonetheless adduce such proofs had not, in fact, themselves been decisively moved by them, when giving assent to theism. Instead, he maintained, psychologically this assent is emotional or affective in origin.

Thus he is telling us that motivationally, the dialectical excogitations offered as existence proofs are post hoc rationalizations in which an elaborate intellectual façade takes the place of the deep-seated wishes that actually persuaded the theologians. Speaking epigrammatically in another context, Freud quotes Shakespeare's Falstaff as saying that reasons are "as plenty as blackberries" (S.E., 1914, 14:24).

It would seem to be basically a matter of empirical psychological fact whether the commonsense constituent of Freud's psychogenetic portrait of religion is sound. Yet, it is not clear how to design a cogent test even of this hypothesis. For note that the required design needs to have two epistemic capabilities as follows: (1) It needs to yield evidence bearing on the validity of the functional explanation of religious belief as being anxiety-reducing; presumably this explanation postulates some kind of stabilizing psychic servomechanism that reacts homeostatically to psychological threat; and, furthermore, (2) the required test needs to be at least able to rank-order the intensity of the wish to escape from anxiety, as compared to the motivational persuasiveness of the theological existence proofs. Perhaps oscillating anxieties of believers who went through cycles of doubt and belief have already gone some way toward meeting the first condition by Mill's method of concomitant variations. In any case, it would seem that an explicitly fideist belief in the existence of God—which avowedly is not based on any arguments—calls for psychological explanation in terms of wish motives!

The second requirement, however, seems to be a tall order indeed, although it does not warrant putting a cap on the ingenuity of potential empirical investigators. It, too, must be met, because of Freud's bold claim that even the best of the arguments for the existence of God would not have convinced the great minds who advanced them, unless stronger tacit wishes had carried the day, or had prompted these intellects to prevaricate. But note that, so far, Freud's portrayal of the motives for religious belief has studiously refrained from claiming that this belief is false, although he does avow its falsity later, after arguing that it is delusional. Hence whatever the empirical difficulties of validating his psychogenetic portrait, they are hardly tantamount to his commission of the hackneyed genetic fallacy, a mode of inference that he had explicitly rejected by means of disclaimers and qualifications.

In accord with his diagnosis of religion as an unwholesome childish fixation, Freud did advocate—as an experiment worth making—that children be given an irreligious education. But he took pains to say at once: "Should the experiment prove unsatisfactory I am ready to give up the reform and to return to my earlier, purely descriptive judgment that man is a creature of weak intelligence who is ruled by his instinctual wishes" (S.E., 1927, 21:48–49).

The two psychoanalytic components of Freud's triadic psychology of theism—its ontogeny and phylogeny—even more than its pre-psychoanalytic commonsense constituent, exigently require evidence for the existence of the two different sorts of wishes postulated by them. Insofar as even the very existence of these hidden desires is questionable, one remains less than convinced, when told that they contributed significantly to the initial genesis and later persistence of religious creeds. It is a corollary of the evidential scrutiny of the pertinent hypotheses that the psychoanalytic ontogeny of theism still lacks cogent evidential warrant (Grunbaum 1984, 1993).

But Freud was not content to confine himself to explanatory reliance on the conscious quest for anxiety reduction, and on his ontogeny of theism. Rather, he went on to develop a psychoanalytic phylogeny of theism (S.E., 1913, 13:100). In his view, this historical ethnopsychology is a valid extension of psychoanalysis.

As he sees it, by combining ethnography with psychoanalysis, he has discerned a third set of strong wishes that unite synergistically with the other two classes of this triad, and make the psychogenesis of belief in God the Father the more imperative. Therefore he proclaimed: "We now observe that the store of religious ideas includes not only wish-fulfillments but important historical recollections. This concurrent influence of past and present must give religion a truly incomparable wealth of power" (S.E., 1927, 21:42).

Daring and ingenious though it is, Freud's psychoanalytic phylogeny of theism is dubious, if only because it assumes a Lamarckian inheritance of repressed racial memories. Furthermore, contrary to the uniform evolution of religions required by his account, more recent historical scholarship seems to call for developmental pluriformity, as pointed out by Hans Küng in his 1979 book Freud and the Problem of God (p. 67).

Professor Edward Erwin's essay Psychoanalysis: Theory, Therapy, and Method of Inquiry Created by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) herein covers the post Freudians.

Bibliography

primary works by freud

Breuer, Josef, and Sigmund Freud. "On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication" (1893). In The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 2, edited and translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974.

"On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: A Lecture" (1893). In J. Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 3, edited and translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974.

"Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses" (1896). In The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 2, edited and translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974.

"The Interpretation of Dreams" (1900). In The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, Vols. 4 (Part I) and 5 (Part II), edited and translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974.

"The Psychopathology of Everyday Life" (1901). In The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 6, edited and translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974.

"The Claims of Psycho-Analysis to Scientific Interest" (1913). In The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 13, edited and translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974.

"The Return of Totemism in Childhood" (1913). In The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 13, edited and translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974.

"On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement" (1914). In The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14, edited and translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974.

"Repression" (1915). In The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14, edited and translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974.

"Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis" (1915–1917). In The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 15 (Parts I and II) and Vol. 16 (Part III), edited and translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974.

"A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis" (1917). In The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17, edited and translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974.

"A Short Account of Psychoanalysis" (1924). In The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 19, edited and translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974.

"An Autobiographical Study" (1925). In The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 20, edited and translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974.

"The Future of an Illusion" (1927). In The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 21, edited and translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974.

"New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis" (1933). In The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 22, edited and translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1933.

"Analysis Terminable and Interminable" (1937). In The Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 23, edited and translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974.

secondary works

Assoun, Paul-Laurent. Freud, La Philosophie, et les Philosophes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995.

Brentano, Franz. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1995.

Eagle, Morris N. "The Psychoanalytic and the Cognitive Unconscious." In Theories of the Unconscious and Theories of the Self, edited by R. Stern. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1987.

Ellenberger, Henri. The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York: Basic Books, 1970.

Fonagy, Peter. "The Outcome of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy for Psychological Disorders." Clinical Neuroscience Research 40 (2005): 367.

Gay, Peter. A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis. New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1987.

Glymour, Clark. "The Theory of Your Dreams." In Physics, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honor of Adolf Grünbaum, edited by R.S. Cohen and L. Laudan. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel, 1983.

Goleman, Daniel. "Miscoding Is Seen as the Root of False Memories." New York Times May 31 (1994): C1 and C8.

Grünbaum, Adolf. "Critique of Psychoanalysis." In The Freud Encyclopedia, Theory, Therapy, and Culture, edited by E. Erwin. New York; London: Routledge, 2002.

Grünbaum, Adolf. The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Grünbaum, Adolf. "The Hermeneutic Versus the Scientific Conception of Psychoanalysis: An Unsuccessful Effort to Chart A Via Media for the Human Sciences." In Einstein Meets Magritte, An Interdisciplinary Reflection: The White Book of Einstein Meets Magritte, edited by D. Aerts. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic, 1999.

Grünbaum, Adolf. Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis: A Study in the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1993.

Küng, Hans. Freud and the Problem of God. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979.

Leibniz, Gottfried W. New Essays on Human Understanding (1705). Translated by P. Remnant and J. Bennett. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Salmon, Wesley. Statistical Explanation and Statistical Relevance. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971.

Searle, John R. Intentionality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Solms, Mark, and Michael Saling. A Moment of Transition: Two Neuroscientific Articles by Sigmund Freud. New York: Karnac Books, 1990.

Storr, Anthony. "Human Understanding and Scientific Validation." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 9 (1986): 259–260.

Zentner, Marcel. Die Flucht ins Vergessen: Die Anfänge der Psychoanalyse Freuds bei Schopenhauer. Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgessellschaft, 1995.

Adolf Grünbaum (2005)

Encyclopedia of Philosophy