Apparently, Freud is Out of Favor Again . . .

. . . Unless, you work outside of the psychology department. The New York Times took a look at the current standing of Sigmund Freud, whom many consider the father of modern psychology.

I used to think that Freud was crap. But the more I look into modern therapeutic practices, the more I see his fingers touching almost everything in one way or another. Certainly not so much in the neurosciences, but even there he was a fore-runner (he was biologist first).

Part of the reason I think he is not being taught outside of introductory psych classes might be that the neo-Freudians have taken his work so much further than he ever did. That's a good thing. Several of the dominate approaches to therapy -- especially, object relations and self psychology -- grew out of Freudian psychoanalysis.

The Times has a different take:

The study has some shortcomings — course descriptions are not comprehensive and there are no comparative surveys from previous years. Still, it roughly maps out where psychoanalytic ideas — which once dominated the field and from which all psychodynamic therapy springs — have found a home. And it is not, for the most part, in psychology departments.

Alice Eagly, the chairwoman of the psychology department at Northwestern University, explained why: Psychoanalysis is “not the mainstream anymore” and so “we give it less weight.”

The primary reason it became marginalized, Ms. Eagly, said, is that while most disciplines in psychology began putting greater emphasis on testing the validity of their approaches scientifically, “psychoanalysts haven’t developed the same evidence-based grounding.” As a result, most psychology departments don’t pay as much attention to psychoanalysis.

At the same time, wondrous advances, in neuroscience, for instance, have attracted new students and resources, further squeezing out psychoanalysis. Outside the university setting, the refusal of most insurance firms to pay for extended psychoanalytic therapy has limited its reach.

Scott Lilienfeld, a professor in the psychology department at Emory University, said, “I don’t think psychoanalysis is going to survive unless there is more of an appreciation for empirical rigor and testing.”

The humanities and social sciences have welcomed psychoanalysis without caveats. But the report complains of the wide gulf between the academic’s and the psychoanalyst’s approach and vocabulary, which has made their respective applications of Freud’s theories virtually unrecognizable to each other.

I have to admit -- in my English department, among the older professors, it was perfectly OK to do a Freudian reading of a text, but God help you if you wanted to do a Jungian reading. I actually got a B in a graduate level course on James Joyce for doing a Jungian reading of Ulysses (the professor actually told me as much and said, without blinking, "Jung is crap").

Anyway, I think Freud is about to see a renaissance in his popularity, just as Wilhelm Reich is now seeing. Every major city (even Tucson) has a psychoanalytic institute. They are bringing in new therapists all the time.

Here is video of a discussion on Charlie Rose about Freud. I saw this when it aired -- it's a great discussion.

Tags: Freud Is Widely Taught at Universities Except in the Psychology Department, Sigmund Freud, psychology, psychoanalysis, culture, education, history, neo-Freudians