“Let us consider the sort of evidence that has been offered, and particularly let us examine the methods by which these unconscious feelings and inclinations, alleged to be present in all people, are discovered and identified. Surely no fairer example of these methods could be obtained than from the major articles in Freud’s Collected Papers. Ernest Jones, their editor, writes that “all Professor Freud’s other work and theories are essentially founded on the clinical investigations of which these papers are the only published record.”{156}
Freud’s long report published under the title From the History of an Infantile Neurosis{157} can, I believe, be taken as a typical example of this work. In it a dream recalled by the twenty-six-year-old patient as having occurred when he was four years of age is confidently interpreted. The chief conclusions reached about this patient appear to be based fundamentally on this interpretation. Freud reports the entire dream as follows:
“I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in my bed. (My bed stood with its foot towards the window; in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and night-time.) Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they are attending to something. In a great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up....
“The only piece of action in the dream was the opening of the window; for the wolves sat quite still and without any movement on the branches of the tree, to the right and left of the trunk, and looked at me. It seemed as though they had riveted their whole attention upon me.”{158}
Freud draws from this dream a number of conclusions by interpreting its various items symbolically. From its association with a few fairy tales familiar to the patient in childhood and with some not particularly extraordinary early memories he devises an astonishing explanation of the patient’s illness. Freud confidently states that the dream reveals in considerable detail an experience the patient was subjected to approximately two and a half years earlier, when he was eighteen months old. Fragment after fragment of the dream is used by Freud to derive proof that the infant at that time saw his parents while they were having sexual intercourse. He is quite confident that the dream reveals that the parents had intercourse three times in succession while the infant observed them and also that the a tergo position was chosen for their activities. He maintains also that the patient, at eighteen months of age, was so affected by this scene that he had a bowel movement as a pretext to make an outcry and interrupt the parents in their still enthusiastic love-making. In this interpretation the number of the wolves, which the patient recalled as being six or seven, is regarded as an effect of the dreamer’s unconscious processes to disguise what he had really seen—that is to say, the two parents. The fact that the dream scene is quite stationary and the wolves make no movement is accepted as evidence (by reversal) for vigorous coital activity by the amorous couple. The appearance of keen attention noticeable in the dream-wolves who stood in the tree, according to Freud, indicates an intense and absorbing interest on the part of the infant in what he was watching.
The fact that the four-year-old boy experienced fear of the wolves in his dream is said by Freud to represent a terror experienced earlier by the infant at the sight of his mother’s external genital organs when seen as an infant of eighteen months. The interpreter assumes without question that this alleged sight contributed to the belief that the mother had been mutilated sexually. From these points Freud reaches the confident conclusion that when the boy at four years of age had the dream he was suffering from a profound dread of castration by his father. The fact that the wolves who appeared in the dream are remembered as having particularly long tails is considered sound evidence of an opposite state (taillessness) and hence a substantial confirmation of this disquieting dread. This preoccupation is said by Freud to have been the chief deterrent to this four-year-old boy’s dominating impulse, assumed to be a specific and strong yearning for his father to carry out upon him sexual relations per anum. In the entire report no item of objective evidence is offered to support these conclusions. Freud appears, however, to be completely convinced that all this is correct and adequately established. In fact, he insists that his whole study of this case must be “all a piece of nonsense from start to finish, or everything took place just as I have described it above.”{159} {160}
If today one does not find it easy to accept such methods as this as scientific or these conclusions as really plausible, should it be assumed that an unconscious pathologic resistance is distorting the sceptic’s judgment, that unconscious prejudices of his own prevent him from recognizing adequately proved facts? When a method so elastic is employed can we not easily come by it to virtually any conclusion that we might choose? Though the use of symbolism and analogy may indeed be useful in formulating hypotheses, an unsupported appeal merely to symbolism or analogy can scarcely be regarded as a means of establishing valid evidence. If such assumptions are made about what is in the unconscious but what is never made conscious, then surely something more substantial than analogy must be offered to demonstrate or corroborate them. Can we not accurately say that such methods can be used in such a way as to constitute a dynamics of illusion?
It may be said that in condensation the real supporting evidence cannot be adequately presented. This, I admit, is true. It is only when examined in detail that the nature of such evidence can be fairly judged. The full report must be read to see how support for each implausible assumption is sought in making additional assumptions that are often still more implausible. Proof is not adduced by carefully gathering evidence in small items, until out of these individually inconclusive or only suggestive data there emerges a reasonably strong and progressively accumulating indication of plausibility. On the contrary, the more Freud seizes upon to support his amazing claim about the Wolf-Man, the more truly incredible everything becomes. A fact, however small, can lend some little weight to an argument. Additional speculations, and assumptions piled upon assumptions, only compound improbability and at last approach the limits of the preposterous.
It does not seem surprising that Freud, before announcing the significance of this dream about wolves by a four-year-old child and presenting his construction of what he claims happened two and a half years earlier, in infancy, should write; “I have now reached the point at which I must abandon the support of the analysis. I am afraid it will also be the point at which the reader’s belief will abandon me.”{161}
After assuming all the details mentioned above about an alleged scene witnessed by the patient at age eighteen months, Freud asks only for provisional acceptance of his claim. He promises to allay all doubts with evidence as the discussion progresses, and also to tell later how the infant finally interrupted his parents. Nothing recognizable as real evidence is brought forward; we get only further assumptions on the basis of faint resemblances and arbitrarily used symbolisms. Even faint resemblances are not always needed to reach the desired conclusions, since the distinct lack of a resemblance is also accepted as proof equally valid.
Freud does not, however, neglect his promise to tell us how the infant interrupted his parents. Some forty pages afterward he writes:
“I have already hinted at an earlier point in my story that one portion of the content of the primal scene has been kept back. I am now in a position to produce this missing portion. The child finally interrupted his parents’ intercourse by passing a stool, which gave him an excuse for screaming.”{162}
Years of analysis of the patient apparently never brought out one shred of memory to confirm this alleged episode imagined by Freud in such vivid detail. No facts are offered to support the contention that, on this or any other occasion, the patient ever saw his parents having intercourse. Freud does not even report evidence of this as a conscious fantasy. He says, however, of the additional assumption that the infant brought the activities of the parents to an end by defecation: “The patient accepted this concluding act when I had constructed it, and appeared to confirm it by producing ‘transitory symptoms.’ “{163}
Many years later, Freud still expressed absolute conviction that his analysis of this patient’s dream proved beyond doubt that he labored under the fear of castration. In The Problem of Anxiety he states;
“The Russian’s fear of being eaten by a wolf contains no suggestion of castration, it is true; through oral regression the idea has been removed too far from the phallic stage; but the analysis of his dream makes any other proof superfluous.”{164}
This I think is a fair demonstration of the methods by which alleged evidence has been obtained for the belief in universal castration fear, for the assumptions of bisexuality, of a normal homoerotic component of the libido, and for many other major articles of the currently popular creed of “dynamic” psychiatry. These articles have become so reverently cherished that many insist the definition of relatively simple and familiar terms must be altered so as to coincide with them and offer a specious verbal confirmation.”
