Frederick Crews, "Freud: The Making of an Illusion" (Picador, 2018)
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Whatever you love, find it on eBay. eBay. Things people love. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to New Books and Psychoanalysis, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Cassandra Saltman, your host. Today we'll be speaking with Frederick Cruz about his latest book, Freud, The Making of an Illusion.

Frederick Cruz is a emeritus professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Back in the 1960s, he was an advocate of psychoanalytic theory, but he gradually changed his mind and became one of Freud's most adamant critics. The most recent of his 14 books is the biographical study which we'll be discussing today, " The Making of an Illusion." Dr. Cruz, welcome to the podcast. Glad to be here, Cassandra.

You're not our typical guest on this podcast, so I'm very pleased to have you on. Okay.

I'd like to start by asking a question about your motivation for writing this book. You might be best known for the Freud Wars, which were a series of exchanges in the New York Review of Books debating Freud and his legacy. This took place in the 80s and early 90s. I think the memory wars were 93 to 94. So my question would be, why return to Freud 27 years later? What more did you want to say? Well, yeah, I thought I had finished with Freud

Freud quite a while ago. Then in 2006, a friend of mine in Holland, Han Israels, asked me to help him adapt a really good little book of his from 1993 called Het geval Freud or The Freud Case in Dutch. It had been translated into Spanish and German, but not English.

And I worked with Hahn and we both got kind of excited about carrying on his study, which had just gone as far as studies on hysteria, 1895. So we started to collaborate, but then he kind of got cold feet because Freud just seemed to him too mysterious as a personality. He didn't feel that he had a handle on what was making Freud tick.

But I was getting more and more excited. So we parted company amicably and I just started writing this book. That was in 19. Let's see. It was in 2006. And the book finally came out in 2017. So that's 11 years ago.

If I had thought it would take 11 years, I never would have started because I was 73 years old when I began. But once I got into it, there was no stopping. And fortunately, I made it to publication without keeling over. There were things I had never before read or heard about Freud's life in the book. I was curious about the research that went into it. Well, probably the most original part of the book was

is based on Freud's engagement letters to Martha Bernays. He was engaged from 1882 to 1886. She moved away because her mother wanted to move away shortly after they got engaged. And so their engagement was largely epistolary. Ernest Jones called the letters between them one of the great love exchanges of all time. But unfortunately,

Anna Freud didn't really think that the public was ready to read most of these letters. A selection of them was published by Ernst Freud in 1960, but all the rest resulted away in the Library of Congress from 1982 until 2000. That's when they were released for view by the public.

However, Ernest Jones's wife seems to have made a transcript of the letters in German, and those too were in the Library of Congress. And my friend Hahn had acquired them before it was quite legal to do so. So he had already based his 1993 book partly on these letters, and I found them to be an absolute treasure. There are more than 1,500 of them.

As you may know, they're finally starting to come out in a definitive German edition of five volumes, only three of which were published by the time my book came out. But what I was using was Jones's transcripts. And I just can't begin to tell you how informative they are and what a different picture of Freud they give from the standard one. And how did that picture differ? Well...

Almost all Freud studies take their cues from what Frank Soloway in 1979 called the Freud legend. He was trying to get beyond it with his big book called "Freud, Biologists of the Mind." The Freud legend was really created by Freud himself in his autobiographical study of 1925, in his history of the psychoanalytic movement of 1914.

in his public lectures and in his case histories, which are very charming but not terribly accurate. This is a picture of a man who had a rigorous devotion to scientific truth and a kind of unswerving path, who

faced a great deal of prejudice and hostility even before he came out with his ideas about sexuality. But when he did so, he met a uniform wall of opposition from his colleagues who made life difficult for him in many ways, not just emotionally, but also professionally. But he was very courageous and he was very independent. He had acquired a certain bitter stoicism

from enduring anti-Semitism in his youth and in his educational career. And so he persisted and listened carefully to his neurological patients and realized that they were communicating to him the fact that their neurotic troubles really all had sexual origins. So he began publishing these truths.

and then really meeting horrible opposition from everyone and being regarded as a pornographer and so on and so forth. But he persisted anyway in his lonely path and eventually

He prevailed by showing the world that his new method of analyzing patients also cured them and in addition gave him insight into the structure of their minds. And so all by himself he founded a new science which he was immodest enough to compare to that of Copernicus and Darwin. Now

There's not a word of truth to any of this. It's just a complete fable. And insofar as every biography that I have read is influenced by this legend, it goes astray. So what I tried to do in Freud, The Making of an Illusion, is simply to look at the record without assuming that the legend is either true or false, but just

gathering the facts, looking at the documents, and then narrating Freud's life from his birth in 1856 up to approximately 1905 at the most. And my idea in doing so was to let the facts speak for themselves. The facts tell us a tremendous number of things which are

not in the standard biographies. And I'll just give you one example. I think Peter Gay devotes one sentence to the subject of cocaine. There may be more, but I think it's a sentence. Maybe it's a paragraph. My book has seven chapters on cocaine. Six of them relate to the period 1884 to 1887.

when, as not too many people know, Freud was the world's leading advocate of the medical application of cocaine. The seventh of those chapters deals with the 1890s,

when he was using cocaine in a completely different way. But cocaine is an important feature of life. And to say so is not to say that he was a cocaine addict. My opinion is that he was not, or he certainly was not during his most creative period. But that cocaine influenced him is beyond question, and Ernest Jones himself privately agreed with that opinion.

My first thought is I'm curious why you stopped at 1905 because he wrote so many of his most famous works after that. It's a good question. I'm not interested in Freud's fame. What I was interested in was solving the following puzzle. Freud, in his boyhood and youth, aspired to succeed in the most conventional way. He wanted recognition. And insofar as his fame

career path was funneled into a medical channel. He wanted the approval of his university professors and his medical colleagues. If you look at Freud in the 20th century from, let's say, about 1910 on to the end, you find a man with a very different sense of himself. He now believes that he has discovered

world-shaking truths, that he's one of the greatest scientists who ever lived, that he has uncovered the secrets of not just psychology, but art, sociology, anthropology, history, you name it. And he's really basking in a reputation, which indeed he did earn,

as being one of the great intellectuals and perhaps one of the great scientists of all time. Now, my question, I don't believe any of this, of course, but my question is, how did a man who started out in such a very conventional way end up in a really, what I would call megalomaniac mode at the end of his life? You don't need to study his works in the 20th century to answer that question. What you need to do

is to look at the phases of his development, and there were quite a few, that led him to, let's say, the climactic insight of psychoanalysis, which from Freud's point of view was the Oedipus complex. That idea occurred to him in 1898 and not before. And it wasn't until 1909, 1910,

that he declared the Oedipus complex to be the very heart of the neuroses and the key to the secret of human psychical development. So what I wanted to do was to simply show Freud's early education, his college career, his career in medical school, his service for a number of years in the Physiological Institute in Vienna,

His winning a fellowship to go study with Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris. His entering into private practice, acquiring clients and starting to contest jobs.

theoretical matters with his contemporaries and to start to maneuver himself into a position of advantage with his colleagues in the public while at the same time trying to affect cures of various kinds. So that's a lot and I'm not surprised in looking back that it took me a very long time to talk about all those things.

It really is an attack on his character. It's kind of a psychological profile that you put forth. Yeah, I wouldn't call it an attack because I've been attacking Freud a lot since 1980. And I know that Freudians who have not read my book and have no intention of reading my book say, here's another attack by Cruz who has a compulsion to attack Freud.

But it's not an explicit attack. It's an explanation, and it's a narrative explanation. Essentially, what I'm trying to do is to tell the story. I quite agree that in my comments on the story, I say things that are not flattering about Freud. But I think those things are implicit in the facts that I bring forward. I mean, a lot of the book accuses him of being greedy and opportunistic and adulterous and

and money hungry, those feel like judgments about his character. Those aren't judgments, those are facts. Those are facts. For example, Freud said to Fleece, money is laughing gas for me. He said to Jung that money was the complex over which he felt he had the least control.

Sandor Ferenczi was amazed by Freud's obsession with the fees of his patients and Martha Freud herself said you are too obsessed with money. So these are not my judgments. These are the judgments of his contemporaries and himself. We have to realize that Freud began in considerable poverty.

And perhaps his principal aim in his youth was to exit from that poverty in some way or other. It was his poverty which kept him from getting married in 1882. And he was desperate to have some kind of windfall that would enable him to get enough money so that he could settle down with Martha. But when he became famous in the 20th century,

and realized that his services were in demand. And in particular, in 1902, when he acquired his professorship at the University of Vienna, the very first thing he did was to raise his rates. And he really kept raising them for the rest of his life. And it's just, it wasn't a secret among anyone who knew Freud that he cared a great deal about money.

Ernest Jones, in one of the many lies in his book, said that Freud had a very normal attitude toward money. Far from it. He had as many foreign bank accounts as W.C. Fields probably and was very concerned with currency valuations. After World War I, he wanted to accept only American patients because their money was better than other people's.

And he was not interested in neurotics. He was just interested in anyone who could pay the going price. So, yeah, on the subject of money, it's not me. It's there in the record. And the other subjects? Do you feel similarly that it's just an objective reading of the record? Well, I put the record forward and I do comment on it. But anyone who doesn't like my comments could just kind of blot out.

the evaluations and look at what is revealed in the documents that I cite and I think such a person if they were fair-minded would come to the same conclusions

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You said that even in your introduction that you were Freudian originally in terms of at least literary criticism. Right. And I've heard you describe it as you succumbed to Freud, which to me kind of connotes some kind of temptation. What is the temptation with Freud?

Well, I was a Freudian in the 1960s. If you aspire to be a literary intellectual in the 1960s, you were a Freudian. There were very few exceptions. That's what it was. I was a little different in that I was an academic who wanted to apply Freudian ideas to the study of literature. And so I made a certain splash in the middle 1960s doing exactly that.

publishing a book on Nathaniel Hawthorne from a Freudian point of view. But as the 60s progressed and as I taught graduate seminars in the application of Freudian theory to the study of literature, I came up against many, many people who did not think that the Freudian system was a cogent version of psychology. And I was pointed to various texts to read that might correct my apprehension. I did read them.

I'd like to say that I was converted overnight to being an anti-Freudian, but that's not true. I resisted that greatly. And it took me a number of years to understand that I didn't really have a good answer to the objections that had been raised by others. And so by the year 1970, I stopped teaching my graduate seminar. I apologized to my students who I'm

some of whom were still very committed to Freud. And I pretty much dropped the subject of psychoanalysis. Why did I take it up again in 1980? The reason is that my colleagues in the humanities, and particularly in the literature departments, were at that time themselves taking up Freud in a new version, the Lacanian version, which is much wilder, much more nakedly anti-empirical,

And I felt that I had just gone through quite a long intellectual soul searching on a topic that my colleagues were now taking up in a rather naive spirit. And I said, no, no, no, come on. I can steer you away from this. And that's what I started doing in the 80s. Now, the psychoanalyst paid no attention whatsoever to anything I said in the 80s.

But in 1993, I published a long essay in the New York Review of Books called The Unknown Freud. And since the New York Review of Books had been itself a rather pro-Freudian publication, aside from being a very liberal publication, this was big news. And of course, the letters that came in from psychoanalysts and the psychoanalytically inclined were very, very hostile.

And there were so many of these letters that only a small portion of them could be published. I answered them in two subsequent issues. And then a year later, I wrote an essay in the same magazine on the recovered memory movement and pointed out at the end of that two-part essay that some

Partisans of psychoanalysis had become converts to recovered memory, even though it corresponded not to Freud's classical theory, but to his seduction theory. And then another huge set of letters came in. I answered them, etc. That's when the New York Review of Books decided to publish a book called The Memory Wars, which contains an introduction by me, my two essays,

all of the letters about those two essays that were published and all of my replies to those letters plus an afterword by me. That was 1995. I've done a few things about Freud thereafter. One was an anthology of independent critics of Freud and then various other essays were collected in a book called Follies of the Wise, 2006.

And that's when I thought I was really through with Freud, but it turns out that I wasn't. I can tell you that I am now. No one need fear hearing another word from me on the topic. It's finally, you finally said it all. God, yes. Yeah.

One aspect of your body of work in general and the making of an illusion that I'd like to hear more about is the idea of the empirical attitude, which you prize very highly. Yeah. Yeah. You write about kind of issues. Oh, go ahead. No, no. Go ahead. You go ahead.

Well, you write about issues of research and testing with psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. And so my first question would be, what's so important about testing? What's so important about testing in the realm of ideas? I'm stupefied. I'm dumbfounded. What's so important about testing? What's so important about ignoring testing, I think would be a better question.

Now, not everything can be tested. And let's talk about academic psychological research and therapy. These are obviously two very different forms of enterprise. In academic research, to test an idea, of course, you must adapt, you must adopt an independent point of view, and you must take the thesis that you are testing

and line it up against possible alternatives to it, and then devise tests that would discriminate between the adequacy of these versions, maybe a lot more than two. In doing so, what you want to do is find very clear concepts which have very clear implications, and you test the predictions that are implicit in the concepts.

If the predictions do not pan out, then essentially the test has failed. But the research hasn't failed. It's quite interesting. A failed test is still a very good test because it leads you to abandon the hypothesis that you were testing. Now let's look at therapy and contrast. Therapy is not a situation for testing. It's a situation for healing.

In the typical therapeutic dyad, we have two parties, one of whom purports to hold out hope for the amelioration of suffering on the part of the other one. These parties are not equal. One of them holds power over the other, inevitably. It's not a question of any abuse. That's just the way it is. It's an unequal relationship.

the patient is a supplicant, the patient wants to be approved, the patient wants to get an explanation that will be pertinent to him or her and help him or her change an attitude, change a relationship, be relieved of mental pain and so on and so forth. So the result of that is that the patient is extremely vulnerable

to acquiring the therapist's ideas, whether or not those ideas happen to be true. And we all know about the placebo effect, whereby briefly ideas which are not necessarily true can nevertheless be therapeutic because they are imparted in a way that conveys comfort.

Now, the psychoanalytic tradition of knowledge is, for the most part, one of the telling of anecdotes by psychoanalytic therapists reporting the successes they have had with their patients

In general, they have regarded their patients' improvement and their patients' intellectual assent to their theories as validation of those theories. And we all know that there are many schools of psychoanalysis. They're constantly proliferating. And that one psychoanalytic institute would have a dogma that's quite different from that of another psychoanalytic institute. But it seems that once you have

When you're a psychoanalyst and you have a set of theoretical judgments, you're not going to find those judgments invalidated by anything that a patient says. In fact, the reverse is true. You're going to be inclined to feel that you're getting corroboration from everything that your patients say. The bottom line of all this is that psychotherapy is not a good venue for testing ideas.

That's why we have hundreds of schools of psychotherapy, all of which disagree with one another. That's why even Freud, with his very authoritative manner, could not prevent his disciples from peeling off and founding schools of their own with their own ideas about what constitutes the true basis of neurosis and the true basis of cure. So nevertheless, ideas must be tested. And

The only way to test them is to get them into an independent context, and that context is one in which empirical values must be honored. What is that context? What is that context? Well, it's up to the individual researcher to devise a context in which the self-validating aspects of the theory are neutralized. And, you know, the...

The major self-validating aspect of any theory, but I would say particularly psychoanalysis, is suggestion. Suggestion is the inadvertent imparting of one party's ideas and opinions to another. You must guard against suggestion. And if you're an experimenter, you must guard against experimenter effects, confirmation bias, for example.

you must realize that you yourself are likely to latch on to results that are favorable to your pre-existing opinions. But the structure of adequately performed research is such that there are checks that are erected against exactly such biases.

Now, that doesn't mean that any piece of academic psychological research is going to be good. In fact, most of it is probably not very good. But it is inserted into a committee, into a community consisting of people who are motivated to apply rational criticism to whatever ideas are propagated. And so it's the community itself that weeds out error.

And in an academic psychological context, this is a lot easier to do than in a therapeutic context. In fact, in a therapeutic context, it's simply not feasible. So is that to say there's no way to test psychotherapy? Well, you can test psychotherapy on an outcome basis. It's not easily done. And the reason for that is that people have different standards of what constitutes a good outcome.

Also, in a therapy like psychoanalysis, there's no real observation by a third party of what's happening. And so we're rather reliant on what people say, what the patient says and what the analyst says. And of course, a patient says,

can go for many years in psychoanalysis without making much progress, but nevertheless be convinced that he or she is making progress because the person has paid a lot of money and spent a lot of time, invested a lot of emotion in that outcome. So it's very difficult to be objective.

But if third parties study outcomes in a relatively neutral way, and if they take various studies of outcomes and try to aggregate them in meta-studies, they can arrive at tentative results, approximate results. So that is one aspect in which psychotherapy is amenable to scientific scrutiny.

So are there certain peer-reviewed journals that you do put some cautious trust in that are established that you feel are scientific? Well, I think the standard peer-reviewed journals to which articles are submitted for promotion and tenure in reputable psychology departments are

are relatively trustworthy. They're not always trustworthy. Some studies have to be retracted. And recently there have been meta-studies that have shown that quite a large proportion of results that are

put forward in research papers turn out not to be replicable. That's a great embarrassment to the field. So it's not like physics, you know. It's a field which constantly has to reform itself, but at least it has the goal of constantly working toward more adequate formulations.

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I'm curious what your view would be on the emerging field of neuropsychoanalysis, which is in some of these journals. Like Mark Psalms, etc. My view is very simple. The last thing you want to do in order to test some ideas that you tentatively hold is to look around for illustrations of them.

If psychoanalysts look to neuroscience in the hope of finding points of convergence between the two, they will find such points of convergence. It's not hard to do, but this is not the way research should be conducted. The neuroscientists themselves, when conducting neuroscience, don't act that way. They don't look for corroboration.

They look for the kind of discriminating testing that I spoke about earlier. Now, the trouble with neuropsychoanalysis is quite simply that it has a prior commitment to psychoanalysis with every intention of maintaining that commitment. And so it amounts to a cosmetic addition to psychoanalytic lore, giving the impression that psychoanalysis and neuroscience are truly converging.

But if you want to know whether they're really converging, you only need to look at those neuroscientists who do not have a prior commitment to psychoanalysis and ask yourself whether they're heading in a psychoanalytic direction. Read their journals, see which Freudian ideas they're coming up with. The answer is they aren't coming up with any such ideas. Well, they certainly don't call them Freudian if they are. Well, I'll tell you, researchers in general

outside the Freudian tradition are puzzled by the very idea of Freudian research because psychoanalytic concepts are vague.

they do not on the whole entail clear predictions. Consequently, they're not easily testable. Most of them are not testable at all. So, you know, if you take a typical psychology professor at Harvard or Yale or Berkeley or wherever and say, what do you think of psychoanalysis?

That person won't come up with a big detailed critique such as the ones I've tried to publish. He or she will just say, we can't test these concepts. They're not stable enough. They don't have sufficiently clear implications. So they're just not meaningful to us. Well, they're dynamic. Is that what is meant by not stable enough? They're dynamic? No. Let me talk about

the psychodynamic point of view. Of course, there are many, many schools of psychotherapy that are psychodynamic and not specifically Freudian. The promulgation of the psychodynamic point of view is probably the most influential aspect of psychoanalysis in the general field of therapy. What is the psychodynamic point of view?

It is the point of view whereby the mind is conceived as being divided against itself. In Freud's view, his mature view, there are three parts to the mind that are arrayed against each other, the id, the ego, and the superego. But he had various other kinds of antitheses, such as conscious versus unconscious, and so on. The psychodynamic point of view

tells us that we should expect any expression or any action performed by a human being to be a vector of conflicting forces within the mind. The mind is opposed to itself. And in Freud's rhetoric, the ego and the id and the superego are really homuncular agencies within the human organism.

each having its own interests, each having its own values, sometimes each having its own symbols. And they fight with each other. And so what this does for the Freudian analyst is to enable a kind of retracing of the path of this dynamic conflict and arriving finally at the ultimate conclusion

libidinal forces at the bottom of these compromise formations which are human expressions. Now, is this true? It's never questioned within the Freudian tradition. It's an axiom which runs so deeply that nobody ever thinks to say, wait a minute, could this possibly be true?

But if we look at human beings from an evolutionary point of view, and Freud did, of course, he was a passionate Darwinist, we would hardly expect the human species to have arrived where it is in terms of survival.

if it were set up in that fashion. If the mind constantly had to oppose itself in order to accomplish anything, that would be very unusual. What we would expect from a Darwinian perspective is that the mind would work pretty well in concert with itself. And we know, for example, that there are two hemispheres in the brain. We know that they work in remarkably different ways, but we also know that they work together.

They work together both when they are cooperating and when one of them is inhibiting the other. One is inhibiting the other for very good reason, for an adaptive reason. So I would think that although the mind can never be mapped onto the brain in any kind of naive way, anything we want to assert about the mind ought to be compatible with what we know about the brain.

And the psychodynamic point of view doesn't seem to correspond to anything that we actually know about the human brain. We're learning a great deal from neuroscience. You know, we should stay tuned every week, every month to learn more about the brain.

When we learn about the brain there are always implications for the mind That's that's the path of the future But I think that path won't include the psychodynamic point of view So you write in the book that there are things that kept Freud from having a sunnier model of the psyche Is this the model you're speaking to now that there isn't inherent conflict? It was um that

There are certain things that kept Freud from having a, quote, sunnier model of the psyche, is page 25. So I'm wondering what is a sunnier model of the psyche, or are you starting to speak to that right now? Well, needless to say, I couldn't care less whether the model of the psyche is sunny or not. But Freud's a great rival. You couldn't care less. Huh? You couldn't care less? I don't care less about sunniness. What I care about is truth.

If I wanted a model of the mind, I would want the one that corresponded to the facts that we can ascertain whether they are sunny or not. What's the virtue in sunniness? Well, sunny was your word, so that's why I used it, but...

So you don't want a sunnier model of the psyche? You want one that's just based on truth and the truth is in... Where is your model coming from of the psyche, I guess, would be my question. I don't have a model of the psyche. You don't have one. And I think it's a mistake for people to think that in order to attain useful knowledge, they need a total model of the psyche. They really don't. We can acquire our knowledge in quite discrete ways.

and simply be without an overarching point of view until such time comes as such a point of view looks justified. Darwinism is such a point of view, an overarching point of view, which receives incessant corroboration from the discrete discoveries that are made in the natural world. That's fine.

To my knowledge, there's no such corresponding overarching philosophical generalization that unifies all of our knowledge about the mind. But so what? My concern with Freud is not to devise a rival psychology of

the mind, I'm much, much more modest than that. I'm just a critic of Freud. And what I'm interested in is where he went wrong and where his movement went wrong. I will add that I'm also interested in the lingering contemporary consequences of theories of Freud's, which may yet be rather noxious socially.

Along those lines, what would you want to happen to psychoanalysis? What would happen if the AMA and the APA accepted that Freud was a fraud? And what would you want to happen to the institutes? Well, first of all, it's not possible for me or probably anyone else to say where Freud stands among psychoanalysts today.

I don't think there's, well, maybe there are one or two points of Freudian thought that any psychoanalyst could subscribe to, such as the existence of the unconscious, the existence of repression, the existence of transference and counter-transference. I think that would be about it. I don't think you would find a consensus beyond that. It's really up to the psychoanalysts themselves to

to decide what they want to do with the image of their founder. In general, Freud is treated as a kind of icon, almost as a logo of psychoanalysis, rather than someone who is actively consulted in order to solve a given case these days. As you know, there are very few orthodox Freudians left.

So what's left is a kind of general respect for Freud combined with an allowance for the fact that he must have made many mistakes, that he was a man of his time, that we've gone beyond Freud and so on. I find all this rather wishy-washy, but I don't really care much about it. And I'm not involved in any intimate way with psychoanalysis as it's actually practiced.

I suggest that in the long historical run, psychoanalysis has gradually accommodated itself to common sense to a greater and greater degree, so that now it's quite hard to tell exactly what's Freudian about it. But it's not my business to say.

Are there any psychoanalysts, Ferenzi, Adler, Klein, Young, who you do support or do resonate with you, or is it all a house of cards? House of cards. All of them? Yes. Mm-hmm.

I couldn't help wondering while I was reading your book and your bio that I know both your parents were very literary and scientific, so I can assume Freud must have been a household name. No, not at all. My mother was very literary. My father was scientific. Neither one of them ever mentioned Freud to me. No, I picked up Freud in my formative years, you know, after high school, really.

because he was in the air. And the people that I admired, the partisan review crowd, Lionel Trilling, those people, they had been Marxists in the 1930s. And Marxism kind of exploded with the Hitler-Stalin pact. And these people gradually sashayed from Marx to Freud.

So that New York literary culture, which I admired very much when I was around 30 years old, was a Freudian culture. Freud was just taken for granted. That's what I fell in with. And I, you know, I read Ernest Jones's monumental biography when it came out between 1954 and 1957. I believed every word of it. And it's interesting.

It's a hagiography. It's the portrait of a great hero of science and medicine and a great humanist. Not particularly true, but it was very inspiring. So it sounds like for you originally, perhaps the temptation was cultural or about fashion or style. The temptation was explanatory. That is, in the early 60s,

I was reading Nathaniel Hawthorne, thinking of writing a book about Hawthorne. I already had a kind of vague interest in Freud. It occurred to me that Hawthorne and Freud were uncannily alike in certain ways. They both were concerned with their ancestors. They both were concerned with dark secrets. There was a kind of furtive sexuality about them. And so,

I looked more closely into Freud, and I seemed to be seeing propositions that helped me to unlock secrets in Hawthorne. And so I wrote a book called The Sins of the Fathers, 1966.

that essentially put forward the thesis that if we want to understand what's really going on underneath the surface of Hawthorne's works, we need to import Freud into our explanatory framework. I should say that this book was very influential. I wish that nobody had read it

But in fact, it made a difference. It helped to inaugurate the vogue of Freud in the American Academy. And people kept reading the book long after I wanted them to stop. In 1980, the University of California Press asked me if I would like them to reprint this book, which had originally come out with Princeton University Press. And I said, why would you want to do a thing like that?

And they said, well, because it's influential. So I said, okay, I will let you reprint this book if you allow me to include an afterword explaining why the argument is mistaken. And they said, well, okay. So that's what I did. And if you ever get that edition of my book, please start at the end rather than the beginning.

So we only have a you know, we're about at the end of our time But speaking of your other books, I do have to say that I found the the poo books very funny. Oh good. Well the first one 1963 was just written as a joke. It just took me three weeks. I never thought anybody would publish it and it was written in a kind of happy spirit and

The second one, Postmodern Pooh, which came out in 2001, also tries to be funny. I hope it's funny, but it was not written in such a happy spirit. It's really a critique of developments in the literary academy that I find pretty dubious.

Thank you.

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Oh, it's such a clutch off-season pickup, Dave. I was worried we'd bring back the same team. I meant those blackout motorized shades. Blinds.com made it crazy affordable to replace our old blinds. Hard to install? No, it's easy. I installed these and then got some from my mom. She talked to a design consultant for free and scheduled a professional measure and install. Hall of Fame son. They're the number one online retailer of custom window coverings in the world. Blinds.com is the GOAT. Shop up to 45% off select styles, plus a

I mean, you've convinced me that your skepticism is truly promiscuous. It goes to a lot of different places and institutions. I call myself a skeptic.

And a skeptic is not a person who denies everything. A skeptic is a person who wants to hear the reasons for and against whatever it is that you're saying to him. I find that very exhilarating. And I do like to debate people on skeptical topics, on controversial topics.

I think that, you know, we have a shortage of skepticism where I come from now out here in California. We have no shortage of spirituality, but we have a great shortage of rationality. And that's that I throw my hat in that ring.

I was surprised when reading your criticisms on medication, as many kind of see it as a hard science alternative to therapy. But I was pleased to see you were pretty critical of that as well. Of medication? Well, I did write a review essay about big pharma.

And it's quite interesting approach to testing.

whereby negative results can be discarded. Yeah, that is one application of my point of view. You know, I've written about other things. I've written about the Rorschach test. I've written about creationism. I've written about the UFO cult. I've written about theosophy. And all of these things, I essentially apply the same point of view, which is show me, show me.

Well, there's much more to say. Not too much to say in 50 minutes, but I'll wrap up by asking you, what's next? What are you working on next? What's next? All right. I will tell you that my current project is to get an innocent man out of prison. He doesn't belong there, and I am making efforts to

to explain why. If that sounds very mysterious and any of your listeners want to learn more, they can send me an email.

[email protected] and I'll be quite happy to send them material to that effect. I don't want to go into it now but that's what I'm doing. I no longer have a big book project. I'm almost 88 years old but again I care about justice and care about true ideas and

And this is a case in which some very bad ideas send a man away. So I hate to be mysterious, but that's what I'm up to right now. Well, I bet some of our listeners will write you. That does sound very intriguing. I hope they do. And let me just say, since your listeners are in the psychoanalytic community,

I know that a great deal has been said about me by psychoanalysts over the years. A lot of it is very mythical.

It's kind of flattering in a way because I'm often called the foremost critic of Freud. That's absolutely not true. There are a number of people who've done much more substantial work, people like Frank Soloway, people like Malcolm MacMillan, people like the late Frank Chaffee. But I myself, in my latest work,

I'm not really repeating polemics from an earlier period. I am doing a biographical investigation and I have yet to come across a Freudian reader, except with the possible exception of you, Cassandra, who has actually read my book from beginning to end. So I would just say to your psychoanalytic listeners,

See if you can bear to open this book and read it with as open a mind as you can muster. I think you will find that it is not suffused with anger, as has often been said by people who haven't read it and don't want to read it. I think you'll find that instead it's quite calmly analytic.

And if you disagree with my analyses, fine. That's great. I'd like to hear from you if you disagree. But I'm quite willing to be in dialogue with you. And I hope you can say the same about me.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for being on the show. And if you have anything else to say about psychoanalysis, let me know and you can join us again. Okay. And I promise everyone I will have nothing further to say about psychoanalysis. All right. Well, thank you all for listening. And that's all for now. So till next time. Thank you.