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FREUD IS A FRAUD |
2 Pages - Page 2 |
| Psychoanalysists from hell |
| Psychoanalysts soon started claiming that they not only understood the cause of such illnesses as schizophrenia, but that they could cure it. The new breed of analysts remained true to the spirit of their master: freewheeling theories and practices unchecked by meaningful empirical tests. But they came up with new explanations for madness: it was all mommy's fault. Or, mothers and fathers both caused it by their own mad behavior. |
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Of course, if the parents caused the disease, then the cure would have to involve getting rid of the parents. The best way to do this was to devise treatments that isolate the patient, get him to reject his family, and encourage him to accept the therapist as a surrogate parent. It would not be long, however, before attachment to the therapist, encouraged by the very methodologies used, would itself be seen as another problem that belonged to the patient. | |
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Frieda Fromm-Reichmann declared that schizophrenia was "a secondary result of very early serious warping of relationships with the people significant in their environment in infancy and childhood". "Serious warping" - now, there is a truly scientific term! One might say that the serious warping continued with the therapist who now offered hope to the patient by claiming that she could undo the wrong that had been done to the child, the wrong that had caused schizophrenia. She would cure all their wounds and frustrations, like a good doctor and good mommy.
Soon there would be analysts claiming that just about every illness, physical as well as mental, was caused by bad parenting. Two analysts in particular were important to this development: Helen Flanders Dunbar and Franz Alexander. In 1947, Dunbar published Mind and Body, in which she declared that people get sick because subconsciously they want to get sick to receive "compensation for the neglect or severity they may have suffered in childhood" (68). In 1950, Alexander published Psychosomatic Medicine in which he claimed that asthma is caused by "a repressed desire for the mother" and other such nonsense.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Karl Menninger, with his father and brother, ran the Menninger clinic in Topeka, Kansas. He proclaimed that love would remove the evil in man's heart, that he was more "Freudian than Freud," that criminals are mentally ill, and that all mental illness was temporary, basically the same, and could be cured by psychoanalysis, i.e., talk therapy. Anxiety was the root of all illness; therapy would relieve anxiety. Since we are all anxious to some degree, the mentally ill do not differ from us in kind but in degree of anxiety. Such a view rendered diagnosis superfluous. One could begin the treatment right away, since the analyst knew before seeing the patient that he or she suffered from excessive anxiety. (This approach is popular today with repressed memory therapists. They know before the patient reaches the door that her problems are caused by repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse.) The fact that Menninger had no scientific evidence to support his notions was deemed of no importance to those who saw him as a messenger of hope who respected the criminal and the insane as fellow human beings with fixable problems. It seems to have mattered little to his supporters that he didn't know what he was talking about.
Two other very influential analysts in the 1950s and 1960s were psychiatrists Harold Searles and John Rosen. Both treated their patients as an angry parent who lacks self-control might treat a naughty child. Searles and Rosen not only assumed that their patients were ill because of bad parenting or grandparenting, they believed that the cure would be reparenting with the therapist as the surrogate parent. If the way they treated their patients was their idea of good parenting, however, one would need Dante as a guide through Hell to describe their idea of bad parenting. Like Freud, they treated everything as a symbol and gave themselves absolute power to interpret these "symbols" in any way they saw fit. They abused their patients psychologically and physically.
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Searles contribution to theory was that the mother causes schizophrenia in the child because of unconscious, repressed feelings of love for the child which the mother is unable to express because her mother was a bad parent. Thus, grandmothers are really the cause of schizophrenia. Rosen, on the other hand, was best known for what he called "direct analysis," in which, he claimed, he spoke directly to the patient's unconscious and could cure anybody of anything, including schizophrenia. In 1971, Rosen was named Man of the Year by the American Academy of Psychotherapy. In 1983, he gave up his license to practice medicine when he was faced with sixty-seven violations of the Pennsylvania Medical Practices Act (116). He and his associates beat and tortured a number of patients, at least one of whom died from their reparenting. This homewrecker obviously didn't love his mother very much... |
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