February 17, 2001 THINK TANK Freud, Influential Yet Unloved By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Jared Diamond, a professor of physiology at the U.C.L.A. School of Medicine, argues that only two scientists in the last 200 years can justifiably be called irreplaceable: Freud and Darwin. In an essay in the February issue of Natural History magazine, he tries to explain why Darwin is so revered and Freud so often reviled. Here are excerpts:
Have any individuals really made a major, lasting difference to the course of science? More specifically, would their discoveries or conceptualizations have eluded other scientists until decades later if these individuals had not been born, and did their contributions have a unique impact that persisted long afterward? By those two criteria, I think that only two scientists within the last two centuries clearly qualify as irreplaceable: Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud. (I feel unsure whether Albert Einstein's impact was as far-reaching.) . . .
To begin with, Darwin and Freud were both multifaceted geniuses with many talents in common. Both were great observers, attuned to perceiving in familiar phenomena a significance that had escaped almost everyone else. Searching with insatiable curiosity for underlying explanations, both did far more than discover new facts or solve circumscribed problems, such as the structure of DNA: they synthesized knowledge from a wide range of fields and created new conceptual frameworks, large parts of which are still accepted today. Both were prolific writers and forceful communicators who eventually converted many or most of their contemporaries to their positions. . . .
Darwin's contributions came at a time when almost everyone (including scientists) believed in the divine and independent creation of species, and when scientists were recognizing patterns in the burgeoning discoveries about fossils, taxonomy, and biogeography but still lacked explanations for those patterns. . . .
Freud's contributions came at a time when interest in mental illness and its classification was growing but its etiology was virtually unknown and treatments were mostly ineffective - in part because clinicians and researchers were still focused on conscious, cognitive processes. Freud's status is unique because he recognized an entirely different mental realm, and many of his concepts - pioneering and radical in their time - are so familiar today that they have entered the daily vocabulary of the general public. . . .
[Yet] today we seem much more inclined to castigate Freud for his omissions and errors than Darwin for his. I suspect that there are two reasons for our differing attitudes toward these two pioneers. One is that Freud's failures, unlike Darwin's, have had a direct impact on the lives of individual human beings. Most of us don't suffer as a result of Darwin's having eventually attributed too much scope to the process termed sympatric speciation than it actually deserves. But a powerful man's mistaken ideas about women have certainly caused suffering, just as victims of child abuse have been made to suffer when the reality of their trauma has been denied.
The other reason we are inclined to judge Freud more harshly than Darwin is that these two scientists were near opposites in their relations with peers. In this regard, we find much to admire in Darwin and much to deplore in Freud. Darwin was outstandingly generous in crediting others - including, most notably, [Alfred Russel] Wallace - for their work. . . .
Freud, on the other hand, was outstandingly ungenerous: he denied credit to others, was intolerant of rivals, hated many people, and surrounded himself with unquestioningly loyal admirers. . . .
Both Darwin and Freud have had their detractors, and the ideas of both men initially faced fierce opposition. Today very few scientists hold low opinions of Darwin, either as a person or as a scientist. The overwhelming majority of those who fundamentally disagree with Darwin's findings today are not scientists at all, but creationists, who do not engage seriously with the facts of biology. Virtually no contemporary scientists believe that Darwin was basically wrong. Since Darwin's time, we have of course discovered masses of new facts, formulated new concepts, and advanced beyond many of his specific interpretations, but modern biologists still consider themselves to be Darwin's intellectual descendants, working within his tradition. By contrast, Freud's detractors remain numerous, even though they take for granted many of his concepts and contributions. . . .
I acknowledge a legitimate moral base underlying such Freud-bashing: the human consequences of his scientific errors, and his often ugly interpersonal relations. But there are two other types of Freud-bashing that are not defensible. One consists of pointing out all the new things learned and all the new therapies devised since Freud, as if these represent his failures or demonstrate the uselessness of his work. . . .
The other type of Freud-bashing - much more damaging because it hurts patients - comes from a too-narrow focus on biological psychiatry. I fully accept the importance of biological psychiatry, having devoted some of my own research to problems in that area (neurotransmitters and manic-depressive illness). . . . But now the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme: psychiatry departments have become bastions of molecular biology, at which much more time is devoted to studying and teaching psychopharmacology than to what are called talk therapies. . . .
To my mind, academe's swing away from talk therapies is tragic. Major advances are still being made in this field - for instance, in crisis counseling and in child and family therapy. . . .
Even specialists in biological psychiatry need thorough training in talk therapies, because it can be difficult to figure out whether a patient's problems have a primarily biological or a primarily nonbiological basis. Even clients whose problems are probably fundamentally biological (such as in manic-depressive illness) tend to have associated psychological issues that need attention. Physicians who rely heavily on prescribing drugs often don't take time to establish a relationship with a patient, regularly forget that the patient and physician are locked in an emotionally charged relationship, and then are surprised at how often patients fail to take the drugs prescribed for them. Understanding that unique two-way relationship was one of the many deep and far-reaching insights that put Freud right up there with Darwin.