FREUD AND SCIENTIFIC TRUTH

In: Commentary, Band 25, Heft 4, S. 343-349

Abstract

A polemical exchange touched off by an earlier article by Meyerhoff. McCall: Many of the eulogists, including Mr. Meyerhoff, used the occasion of the centennial for broadsides against the so-called cultural deviationists. The revisionists are highly vulnerable targets. They substitute one monism for another, their theories are as unsusceptible as Freud's to verification, & the results of their treatment are equally questionable. But the Freudians do not attack them on methodological but on philosophical grounds. To attack them methodologically would mean opening the Freudian system itself to examination. Instead, the revisionists are accused of being light-minded optimists. But is a pessimistic theory founded on false premises any `deeper' than an optimistic theory founded on false premises? The Freudians are attacking, through the revisionists, the tradition of the Enlightenment which holds that man is a rational animal who can solve his problems through the use of his intelligence. Meyerhoff: Freud never claimed infallibility for himself- as Jones has shown abundantly in his biography. Greatness will do for praise. There is little enough in our world as it is; & compared with his critics & his epigones, Freud looms like a giant. It is embarrassing to have to defend him again--at this time, in these pages, & against such scurrilous charges. Freud would not have thought it worth bothering. J. A. Fishman.