Product-withdrawal Notice: I was wrong about Freud

Source: Christopher Badcock

Psychoanalysis was never without its critics, but until a few years ago I was not one of them. On the contrary, with the single-mindedness and immunity to criticism that is characteristic of those with an autistic turn of mind, I ignored it all and went my own way believing that ultimately developments elsewhere in science would vindicate Freud—and wrote several books to prove it. This led to a private didactic analysis with Anna Freud terminated by her death in 1982. I worshipped at the shrine of the prophet with the high priestess four days a week forty weeks a year for almost three years. Inspired by faith, I became an evangelist—at least for Freud, if not for psychoanalysis—and from the mid-1970s until 2002 taught a very successful undergraduate course on Freud at the London School of Economics. Indeed, so identified did I become with him in the eyes of my students that one of them made this morphed image of me and the Master of Mentalism.

But that course is now extinct, and readers of my latest book, The Imprinted Brain; how genes set the balance between autism and psychosis (Jessica Kingsley May 2009) will find that a part of the last chapter reads a bit like those product-withdrawal notices you see in your supermarket. Certainly, this was an important aspect of the book for me: it gave me a chance to recant my Freudian faith and confess to the egregious errors I had made.

What had happened? You need to read the whole book to understand that, but a short answer is: I discovered autism, and more important still, I began to see that, far from being a cure for mental problems, psychoanalysis was a cultural embodiment of what I would now call hyper-mentalism.

According to the imprinted brain theory explained in the book, genes underlying autistic and psychotic disorders remain in the human genome because they underpin the two fundamental cognitive adaptations of our species. Mentalistic cognition—or mentalism (aka “theory of mind/empathizing/folk psychology/people thinking”)—evolved to facilitate social interaction and became the basis of mental culture: religion, politics, commerce, art, and literature. Mechanistic cognition (aka “systemizing/folk physics/things thinking”) evolved to facilitate physical interaction with the non-human, material world of objects and became the basis of science, technology, and material culture. The two systems of cognition are normally more or less balanced in any individual. However, thanks to the mechanisms of gene expression concerned, the balance can easily be disturbed. A deficit in mentalism (sometimes with an excess in mechanistic cognition in so-called autistic savantism) explains autistic spectrum disorders while the opposite—excessive mentalizing—explains most of the symptoms of psychotic spectrum disorders.

Looked at from this novel point of view, psychoanalysis was an institutional form of hyper-mentalism comparable to paranoid schizophrenia. Recovered schizophrenics comment that their psychosis is a disease of over-interpretation, of seeing meaning where there is none, and of intuiting intentions, thoughts, and emotions in others that simply do not exist. Psychoanalysis institutionalized this form of paranoia in its belief that analysts could interpret free-associations, dreams, and slips of the tongue or hand to reveal an infantile, repressed unconscious in the individual.

But of course, if this unconscious mind existed, precocious autistics would have revealed it long ago thanks to their inability to deceive themselves or others, immunity to convention and constraint, and perverse insistence on being themselves. Autistic savants in particular revealed that the un-socialized, pristine mind of the child was more like a thinking computer than the inferno of repressed drives and sleazy sexuality imagined by Freud. The passions of autistic savants are timetables, calendars, and machines, not incest, parricide, or primeval rage. Far from being the indiscriminate feeding machines the Freudian id might suggest, autistic children often have fastidious food avoidances. And contrary to Freudian dogma, savant-like preservation of infantile memories by some autistics reveals a fascination with things, not people.

So this is my product-recall notice. Readers who wish to find out more should read The Imprinted Brain with close attention—especially to the footnotes to the last chapter.