Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

Dreams were not the only aspect of behavior that Freud interpreted in symbolic fashion. His penchant—almost mania—for finding hidden, symbolic meanings nearly everywhere reveals the absurdity not only of his specific method of symbolic interpretation, but also of the process in general. Freud was a very close friend of Wilhelm Fliess, the inventor of biorhythms (see chapter 6), who was a surgeon in Vienna in the late 1800s. Fliess was a man of many peculiar ideas, biorhythms being just one of them. He believed that many of his patients suffered from what he termed the nasal reflex neurosis. This neurosis could manifest itself in any number of symptoms and Fliess was “rarely at a loss to discover that one of his patients had a nasal reflex neurosis” (p. 10). The treatment for this disorder ? Application of cocaine to the inside of the nose—no doubt a popular treatment, at least if Fliess were practicing today. Unfortunately, if the local application of cocaine didn’t cure the neurosis, more drastic measures had to be taken. Fliess would cauterize the spots in the nose upon which the sexual organs were represented (Fliess believed that the nose was a secondary sexual organ itself) and, if that unpleasant procedure failed, one of the small bones inside the nose would be surgically removed.

So it was with Emma Eckstein, who was unfortunate enough to be a patient of both Fliess and Freud. Surgical skills and procedures in the late 1800s were not what they are now; nor, apparently, was Fliess what one might call a master surgeon. When he removed the bone from Emma Eckstein’s nose, he left several feet of gauze in the wound. Not surprisingly, this resulted in nasal hemorrhages. Freud, who was also treating Emma at the time, came to an astonishing conclusion about the nature of these hemorrhages. They were, so Freud wrote to Fliess, symbolic representations of Emma’s sexual “longing” for Freud and an attempt by her to seduce him (Crews 1984; letter to Fliess originally published in Schur 1966).

Crews (1984) has described another aspect of Freud’s love of symbolic interpretation. Fliess believed, and apparently influenced Freud strongly in this regard, that all humans were inherently bisexual. Thus, all males had hidden, or “latent,” homosexual tendencies. These tendencies, of course, had to be repressed if normal heterosexual activity was to take place and the species was to perpetuate itself. But in the distant past, males weren’t so skilled at repressing their latent homosexual urges. Rather than actually having sexual intercourse with other males, they expressed their only partially repressed homosexual desires symbolically. How was this done? In his scathing essay “The Freudian Way of Knowledge,” Crews summarizes Freud’s view clearly: Our male ancestors “went around dousing fires with urine, thus experiencing a homosexual gratification in vanquishing the phallic flames” (p. 23). Civilization began to really develop, according to Freud, when fire was domesticated—when man “could sufficiently master his homosexuality to save and nurture a fire instead of obeying his drive to pee on it” (p. 23).

In addition to applying his psychoanalytic symbolism to understanding, if one can call it that, his own patients and the history of the development of civilization, Freud applied these techniques to the understanding of historical individuals. In doing so, he created the field of psychohistory. His most famous psychohistorical subject was Leonardo da Vinci (Freud, 1916). Stannard (1980) has critiqued Freud’s psychohistory of da Vinci and found it based on little more than “contrived facts of Leonardo’s childhood” (p. 14) and, of course, the usual symbolic interpretations. One of the “facts” that Freud symbolically interprets is the famous “vulture fantasy” that Leonardo allegedly had as a child. He dreamed, according to Freud, of a vulture that stuck its tail in his mouth. Freud felt that this fantasy was basic to the understanding of Leonardo’s life (Stannard 1980), but it had to be symbolically interpreted. For Freud, the tail of the vulture “cannot possibly signify anything other than a male genital, a penis” (quoted in Stannard 1980, p. 7). Freud then goes on to base his thesis about Leonardo’s creativity and genius on this basic symbolic interpretation of one dream. For various arcane reasons, mostly dealing with the vulture as a mother symbol through history, it is vital for Freud that the bird in Leonardo’s dream be a vulture. But it wasn’t—Freud read of the dream in a biography of da Vinci that contained a mistranslation into German. While Leonardo’s notes refer to a “kite,” a very different type of bird, the translation gave the German word for vulture. Thus, Freud built his entire psychohistory on an error. Interestingly, this does not seem to have bothered later psychohistorians who, in true pseudoscientific fashion, have not modified their views of da Vinci to take into account the new data.

Since Freud’s psychoanalysis of da Vinci, numerous other historical figures have been subjected to psychohistorical analysis based on symbolic interpretations of their actions, childhoods, and relationships. The symbolic interpretations have not always been strictly Freudian, but such psychohistories are inherently pseudoscientific. Stannard (1980) cogently sums up the situation by saying that while “some works of psychohistory are vastly superior to others, little, if any, psychohistory is good history” (p. xiii).

History is certainly not the only field in which symbolic interpretation, Freudian or other, has been applied. Such symbolic interpretation has been adopted with special vigor in the study of drama and literature. Probably everyone who has ever taken a high school or college English course has heard symbolic interpretations of stories or poems. Such interpretations vary in their degree of absurdity, but all are equally nonfalsifiable and invalid. My personal favorite came from an instructor in a college English course. We were reading James Joyce’s set of short stories, The Dubliners. One question concerned the reason for the presence of snow in the stories. I suggested that this reflected the fact that it snows in Dublin, the setting of the stories, in the winter. To me, this seemed a logical response. I was informed, however, that my response revealed that I didn’t understand the symbolic meaning of literature. Far from being a mere realistic representation of Dublin’s climate, the instructor informed us, the snow was a psychosexual symbol. Snow is wet, white, and sticky; semen is also wet, white, and sticky. Therefore, snow is a symbol of semen, and from this one can deduce that Joyce had deep anxieties about his masculinity. I did not have the nerve then to point out that there is at least one major difference between snow and semen: one is cold, the other warm. However, I doubt that this would have presented any difficulty to the symbolic interpretation. In fact, I suspect that my instructor would have used the difference to support his symbolic interpretation, perhaps along the lines that Joyce’s anxieties made him “cool” to sexual matters and the coolness of the snow symbolically represented this.

In summary, the use of symbolic interpretations of behavior suffers from the same problems found in the symbolic interpretations of psychic predictions, as discussed in chapter 2. No matter what the prediction, or how the subject behaves, the symbolic interpretation will supply “evidence” that appears to validate the theory in question.

As noted at the beginning of this chapter, Freud divided psychosexual development into four stages. One of the most important was the anal stage, because it was during this stage that toilet training took place. As is well known, Freud believed that toilet training had great influence on the development of personality. Specifically, “the methods employed by the mother in training the child, and her attitudes about such matters as defecation, cleanliness, control, and responsibility, determine in large measure the exact nature of the influence that toilet training will have upon the personality and its development” (Hall 1954, p. 107). If toilet training is strict, it may have one of two possible outcomes. First, the child may “get even with frustrating authority figures by being messy, irresponsible, disorderly, wasteful, and extravagant” (p. 108). Second, strict toilet training may result in “meticulous neatness, fastidiousness, compulsive orderliness, frugality, disgust, fear of dirt, strict budgeting of time and money, and other over-controlled behaviors” (p. 108). So strict toilet training can result in either a slob or a neat freak or, presumably, anything in between. Thus, the theory can “explain,” post hoc, any degree of neatness or sloppiness as being due to strict toilet training.