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.
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