Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

Several studies claim to have found experimental support for the reality of the Oedipus complex and castration anxiety. These have been critiqued by Eysenck and Wilson (1973). These studies demonstrate the strong tendency of Freudian psychologists to interpret even the most straightforward results symbolically as evidence for Freudian theories, even though much simpler explanations of the findings are available. Hall (1963), in a study titled “Strangers in Dreams: An Empirical Confirmation of the Oedipus Complex,” found that (1) more strangers in dreams were male than female; (2) this effect was greater for male than for female dreamers; (3) aggressive interactions in dreams were more common with male than female strangers in the dream; and (4) there were more aggressive events in the dreams of males than of females. None of these findings is surprising and none provides support for the reality of the Oedipus complex. All can be simply explained by noting that the dream content reflects everyday reality. Thus, males are more aggressive than females and the dreams’ content merely reflected this fact. Ignoring this far simpler explanation, Hall bases his claim that the findings support the reality of the Oedipus complex on the further unsupported claim that male strangers in dreams symbolically represent the father.

Schwartz (1956) similarly ignores simple explanations that do not support Freudian theory in his study of the responses of male homosexuals and heterosexuals to the Thematic Apperception Test. In this test, the subject sees photographs of people in ambiguous situations and has to make up a story about each photograph. The content of the stories is then scored. In Schwartz’s study, heterosexual and homosexual males scored differently on measures of guilt, fear of punishment, “sexual inadequacy”—which, according to Schwartz, includes “renunciation of heterosexuality”—and general anxiety. Schwartz claims that the first three of these measures indicate castration anxiety, and that thus homosexual males have greater castration anxiety than heterosexual males. However, as Eysenck and Wilson (1973) note, the study was done in 1956, when homosexuality was not only considered a serious disease by most psychiatrists, but was actually a crime and the subject of much more fear, disgust, and loathing than is now the case. Given these circumstances, it is not very surprising that homosexuals would show more fear and guilt than heterosexuals. Nor is it surprising that homosexuals showed more “renunciation of heterosexuality” than did the heterosexuals. In fact, it’s about as surprising as finding that professional basketball players are taller than professional jockeys—and it offers just about as much support for the reality of castration anxiety.

The female equivalent of castration anxiety is penis envy. “The girl’s love for her father is mixed with envy because he possesses something that she does not have. This is known as penis envy” (Hall 1954, p. 111, emphasis in original). Hall and van de Castle (1965) performed what Eysenck and Wilson (1973) term “the most celebrated of empirical ‘verifications’ of Freudian theory” (p. 166). It turns out to be an astonishingly bad study. Dreams of male and female college students were collected and their contents scored for themes that were assumed, in the absence of any supporting data, to symbolically represent castration anxiety and penis envy. The reader will not be surprised to hear that more castration anxiety themes were found in dreams of males and more penis envy themes were found in the dreams of females. But, as Eysenck and Wilson note, there was a fatal flaw in the study. Some of the critieria for scoring a dream for castration anxiety could only be applied to males. Examples are “inability or difficulty of the dreamer in using his penis” and “a male dreams that he is a woman or changes into a woman.” Similarly, some of the criteria for penis envy could only occur in female dreams. An example is “a female dreams that she is a man or has acquired male secondary sex characteristics, or is wearing men’s clothing or accessories.” Thus, the study almost had to come out as it did. Even if this problem were not present, the unsupported symbolic interpretation of the dreams’ contents would invalidate the authors’ conclusions that the results support Freudian theory.

Hall and van de Castle (1965) also found that males had more dreams than females in which injuries occurred. Females had more dreams than males about babies. Rather than adopt the simple, straightforward explanation that these results reflect real-life differences between men and women, the authors relentlessly interpreted them symbolically as showing castration anxiety on the part of males and “displaced penis envy” on the part of females.

The concept of repression is obviously of great importance in Freudian theory, as the foregoing discussion has demonstrated. A defining feature of repression is that it is “motivated” forgetting; that is, it is an active process in which certain memories are blocked from reaching consciousness because of their emotionally negative content. Should such memories reach the conscious level, they could cause serious psychological disturbance.

One well-known phenomenon has long been used to argue for the reality of repression. This is infant amnesia , which refers to the fact that adults have very poor memories for the first few years of life. Freud proposed a characteristically creative explanation for this amnesia. The period of early childhood, according to psychoanalytic theory, is one during which the child is awash with strong sexual desires, most of them incestuous. Since these desires cannot be fulfilled, they result in considerable frustration. Further, in the case of the boy, his lust for his mother may, he fears, result in his castration. These factors lead to a repression of early childhood memories when the Oedipus complex is resolved. Why are all childhood memories repressed, and not just the ones dealing with the child’s sexual desires? Because if any memory from this period came to consciousness, there would be risk that memories of the perverted (by adult standards) and frustrating sexual desires the individual had as an infant would also emerge into consciousness, perhaps causing serious psychological damage.

There is no question that infant amnesia is a real phenomenon. However, research on memory and the brain has shown that its causes are very different from those proposed in psychoanalytic theory. Spear (1979) and Coulter, Collier, and Campbell (1976) have shown that rats also show infant amnesia. Specifically, infant rats trained on simple learning tasks show considerable loss of memory for those tasks over a period of time. Older rats, trained on the same tasks to the same level of performance, show much better memory for the tasks after the same amount of time has passed. In addition to rats, monkeys also show infant amnesia (Mishkin and Appenzeller 1987). It seems most unlikely that rat or monkey infant amnesia is due to the rats or monkeys repressing their incestuous desires for their parents.

The real reason for infant amnesia in rats, monkeys, and humans lies in the nature of the brain of the immature organism. The immature brain is both anatomically and physiologically different from the mature brain. Deep in each temporal lobe of the mammalian brain is a structure known as the hippocampus. Together, the two hippocampi (and, of course, other brain structures) are vital for normal memory function (Zala and Squire 2000). The hippocampi in the human brain do not begin to undergo maturational changes until between four and five years of age (White and Pillemer 1979). Significantly, it is at about this time that the earliest memories adults can recall are found (Waldfogel 1948). Thus, it is the anatomical and physiological changes that take place in the brain, specifically in the hippocampi, that result in more lasting memories being formed by rats, monkeys, and humans who have passed the infant and very young child stages of development.