Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

Freud’s theory also deals in great detail with the development of personality and specifically with the development of sexual behavior and sexual identity. Freud divided this development into four stages. In some of these stages there were specific “complexes” that had to be overcome if the developmental process was to proceed normally. The first of these is the oral stage, where the infant focuses on the pleasure received from oral stimulation. The second, the anal stage, appears when the child is about two. Here pleasure is said to be obtained largely by “withholding or expelling feces” (Hilgard, Atkinson, and Atkinson 1979, p. 391). The next stage is the phallic stage (about ages three to six), where pleasure is derived from the fondling of one’s own genitals. Finally, as adolescence is reached, one enters the genital stage, where sexual desires are directed to others.

Mature personality was a tripartite structure in Freud’s view, with the id, the ego , and the superego each playing very different roles. The id was thought of as the “seed” of personality. The newborn has only an id, and the other structures of the personality develop from it. The id is also the most animalistic part of the personality, seeking only to obtain pleasure and avoid pain. The ego develops as the child grows. It is reality-oriented and modifies or controls the desires of the id by taking into account the possible consequences of an action. Finally, the superego is the conscience of the individual. It judges whether an action is right or wrong, according to whatever set of moral standards the child has been taught. These three structures of personality interact in complicated ways, depending on the situation. “Sometimes the three components of personality are at odds: the ego postpones the gratification that the id wants right away, and the superego battles with both the id and the ego because behavior often falls short of the moral code it represents. But more often in the normal person, the three work as a team, producing integrated behavior” (Hilgard, Atkinson, and Atkinson 1979, p. 390).

The repressed contents of the unconscious could result in psychological disorders. It was the task of the psychoanalytic therapist to discover the repressed, hidden contents of the patient’s unconscious and to help the patient achieve insight into the psychological roots of his problems. According to psychoanalytic theory, once insight was achieved, the psychological problems would fade away because the insight eliminated the repressed cause of the problems. The problem for the therapist, of course, was how to get at the contents of the unconscious, since the patient did not have conscious access to this material. Symbolic interpretations of various forms of behavior, from dreams to accidents, became the primary method by which psychoanalysts attempted to delve into the unconscious. Freud tried hypnosis for a time, but abandoned it. He became especially enthusiastic about the method of free association and dream interpretation as roads to the contents of the unconscious. In free association, the patient simply says anything that comes to mind, often while reclining on the analyst’s couch. Freud felt that such free associations would be uncensored by higher levels of consciousness and would thus reflect the contents of the unconscious. If these free associations were interpreted using the proper psychoanalytic symbology, they could give valuable information about the patient’s hidden fears, anxieties, and desires. Another valuable source of such information was to be found in dreams. For Freud, a dream had two types of content, manifest content and latent content. Manifest content referred to the psychoanalytically uninteresting images of the dream itself. The latent content was the meaning hidden in those images. Latent content could be revealed only through the analyst’s symbolic interpretation of the images in the dream. Thus, “all sharp and elongated weapons, knives, daggers, and pikes represent the male member…. Small boxes, chests, cupboards, and ovens correspond to the female [sex] organ; also cavities, ships, and all kinds of vessels. A room in a dream generally represents a woman” (Freud 1913/1950, p. 242). The symbolism could be much more complex: “a woman’s hat may often be interpreted with certainty as the male genitals. In the dreams of men one often finds the necktie as a symbol for the penis” (p. 243). Everyday errors and slips of the tongue were also interpreted, symbolically, as reflecting hidden conflicts and motivations.

There is an extremely serious problem in symbolic interpretation, whether it is behavior or anything else that is being interpreted: Such interpretations are inherently nonfalsifiable. This is especially true in psychoanalytic theory, where the concept of repression can be used to further protect any interpretation, no matter how absurd, against falsification. Consider a hypothetical example in which a woman dreams that a man forces his way into her apartment through the front door. Doors and other entrances are said to be symbolic representations of the vagina. Since the “entry” in the dream was forced, the easy interpretation of this dream is that it symbolizes rape. Perhaps the dreamer has a great fear of rape or perhaps she has a hidden desire to be raped or otherwise sexually abused. Is there any way to disprove either of these symbolic interpretations? Absolutely not—if we ask the woman, and she protests that she is neither abnormally afraid of rape nor desirous of being raped, it merely shows that her fear or desire is deeply hidden. In fact, her denial is interpreted as further evidence that the interpretation is true. Thus, no matter whether she agrees with the interpretation or argues against it, her behavior will be seen by the psychoanalyst as supporting the interpretation.

The nonfalsifiability of symbolic interpretations of dreams is not limited to psychoanalytic interpretations. Rather, it applies to any type of symbolic interpretation. In nonpsychoanalytic symbolic schemes, where repression does not play such a large role in protecting an interpretation from falsification, another mechanism operates to make the interpretation seem more valid than it is. This mechanism is highly similar to the fallacy of personal validation that was discussed in chapter 2. It will be recalled that this fallacy convinces people that the vague “predictions” of psychics are much more specific than they really are. Like psychic predictions, dreams are vague in the sense that a given dream can appear, after the fact, to be consistent with almost any outcome. This characteristic of dreams has already been discussed in the context of prophetic dreams, but it applies with equal force to the symbolic interpretation of dream content. A major study of the effects of stress on dreaming (Breger, Hunter, and Lane 1971) illustrates this point.

Many nonpsychoanalytic psychologists reject the specific symbolic interpretations of psychoanalysis, but still believe that dream content is at least partially symbolic. A common view is that stressful situations the dreamer is experiencing, or is about to experience, will be symbolically represented in the dream, presumably allowing the dreamer to deal with the stress at less than its full intensity. Breger, Hunter, and Lane (1971) set out to test this view by examining the dreams of a number of individuals who were about to undergo the very stressful experience of major surgery. Their dreams were recorded during the nights before the surgery and were then analyzed to see if the content of the dreams symbolically reflected the impending surgery. The authors concluded that in fact the upcoming surgery was featured symbolically in the dreams of the patients.

The Breger, Hunter, and Lane (1971) study is an influential one, but the conclusions are seriously flawed because of both the way in which the data were collected and the way they were presented in the published report. The authors, who collected the dream reports from the patients and later interpreted them, were well aware of the particular type of surgery that each patient was facing. Thus, it was an easy matter, given the vagueness of dreams, to find symbolic relationships between dream content and the specific surgery that the authors knew patients were facing. In the published report, the reader is first presented with a medical case history for each dreamer; only then are descriptions of the actual dreams provided, followed by the authors’ interpretations of the dreams. Given such a sequence, it is not at all surprising that the reader will agree with the authors’ interpretations. But the seeming correctness of the interpretation is biased by the previous knowledge the reader was given. This knowledge acts like mental “blinders” to prevent the reader from thinking of alternative interpretations. The authors also had such previous knowledge before they interpreted the dream; it prevented them, as well, from seeing alternative interpretations.