January  28, 2012

NYRB: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

In his otherwise commendable overview of Daniel Kahneman’s contributions to psychology, Freeman Dyson winds up in the latter part of his review close to a conceptual tailspin. Bemoaning Kahneman’s alleged failure to reference Sigmund Freud in his book or its thirty-two pages of endnotes, Dyson launches into broadsides about the omission that bear further scrutiny.

Dyson notes the scientific diminuendo of enthusiasm for Freud’s psychoanalysis, both as an explanatory enterprise and treatment approach, and references commentary by Sir Peter Medawar and Frederick Crews. The contemporary disenchantment, however, is far more widespread than many suppose, and includes commentary by such notables as Thomas Szasz, Ernest Nagel, Karl Popper, Karl Kraus, Vladimir Nabokov, Adolph Grünbaum, Malcolm Macmillan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, not to mention a long tradition of academic psychology that is centuries old. Yet Dyson, opting to ignore the fact that this dissenting tradition includes spokespersons who have harbored doubts about the scientific and empirical basis for Freud’s system, clings to the belief that Hahneman’s work somehow lacks appreciation of the “insights” of the founder of psychoanalysis. The stance is all the more paradoxical, since Dyson elects to characterize the difference between Freud and Hahneman as between “literary” and “scientific” contributions. (As early as 1895, we find Freud admitting that, “It still strikes me as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science.”) But if the value of an explanatory system is its appeal to a “literary,” rather than a “scientific” sensibility, why is it a scientific shortcoming to ignore it in a fresh approach to psychological theorizing? And just why are Freud’s insights “complementary,” rather than “contradictory” to Hahneman’s, as Dyson avers? In just what sense does literary value “complement” scientific value in a purely scientific formulation?  

Dyson makes several other curious observations. As against Hahneman’s experimental approach, he contrasts William James along with Freud as a thinker more given to literary, rather than scientific contributions, calling the two “artists” rather than “scientists.” The example is an unfortunate one to illustrate his point, since James in 1890 published the seminal “Principles of Psychology,” a work that along with the laboratory studies of Wundt, Fechner and Helmholz in Germany in the same century set the stage for what was to later become a rich tradition of experimental psychology. And, contrary to Dyson, it was not Hahneman who “was to make psychology an experimental science,” but a tradition begun a century or so before he was born! Nor did he “revolutionize” psychology; he only made an important contemporary contribution to it.

Other of Dyson’s comments would appear to suggest that his familiarity with psychology may be somewhat on the deficient side. According to him, “strong emotions and obsessions cannot be experimentally controlled,” a proposition that seems to be confusing ethical constraints on certain types of research with methodologies that are quite equal to the explanatory challenge. At any rate, investigators like Stanley Milgram, Harry Harlow, Joseph Wolpe and Philip Zimbardo might take exception to any opinion that they were not dealing in their studies with strong emotions. And a long tradition in physiological psychology investigating arousal states from anxiety to penile tumescence is rich in precisely the kind of knowledge Dyson seems to be maintaining is off limits to its methods.