The ID Report

Post details: Freud, Marx, and Darwin ... again - this time from Theodore Dalrymple

01/29/08

by Denyse O'Leary 05:49:29 am, Categories: Commentary - OpEd, 375 words

Freud, Marx, and Darwin ... again - this time from Theodore Dalrymple

Psychiatrist Anthony Daniels, who writes under the name Theodore Dalrymple, sounds about as dubious about "evolutionary psychology" as I am. He writes in the New York Sun,

"The Freudian claim of explanatory power was false, as was the Marxist claim, and as the Darwinist claim, the most popular such explanatory claim today, will prove to be false.

His main target, however, is Sigmund Freud, of whom he writes,

What, if anything, did Sigmund Freud actually discover? What concrete human knowledge would be lacking if he, or someone very like him, had never lived?

With most scientists, the same questions would not be hard to answer. In the case of William Harvey, we might say: He discovered the circulation of the blood. Though philosophers may tell us that all scientific hypotheses are provisional, no one now seriously expects a future scientist to discover that the blood does not, in fact, circulate.

Freud also claimed to be a scientist in the strictest sense of the word (though his world outlook was more scientistic than scientific), but all of his supposed discoveries, such as that of the Oedipus complex, were highly speculative. With little independent empirical evidence to support them, his theories were more like inventions than discoveries. No one would take seriously a doctor who concluded from the fact that a young man had broken his leg playing football that playing football was the one and only cause of broken legs; but this was more or less Freud's method.

Dalrymple's essay provides much interesting information about how Freud's theories boasted a veneer of scientific respectability, mainly (it seems) because they were an alternative to traditional explanations.

Note: My own doubts about evolutionary psychology (which is what I assume Dalrymple means by "Darwinism" in the context) stem from the fact that it attempts to find "explanations" for human behaviour in supposed events that occurred before recorded history and somehow got passed on in our genes. That recalls Freud's efforts to find explanations in unconscious childhood traumas. It is very satisfying to people who need an explanation for their behaviour, but do not want it to be a traditional one. One must finally say, about all of it, "maybe ... but maybe not, and there's really no way to know."

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