Unconscious Bias

It is of no moment to say something complimentary about Sigmund Freud, despite the fact that, as we saw earlier, his thinking about narcissism has been helpful in understanding the likely outcome of efforts to raise self-esteem. Nonetheless, as has been said again and again, Freud is dead. Why resurrect him, especially when even one of his fellow analysts insists that “Freud is less original than he makes himself out to be. Where he is most innovative, he is least reliable” (Kramer 2006, 210). That charge is mild compared to others. Freud, it is argued, played fast and loose with the details of his case studies. He was not above sacrificing an honest portrait of his patient’s symptoms for one that afforded greater congruence with his theory. He matched that infidelity with another, displaying a nasty habit of transforming demonstrable physical causation, such as a violent assault on a woman, into psychological causation, such as anxiety. The patient in question wasn’t raped; she was overcome with anxiety arising from earlier psychological traumas.