THE FIRST OCCURRENCE of the word psychoanalysis was in 1896, the same year as the death

of Freuds father. It was then (or perhaps a year earlier, with the publication of Studies on Hysteria)
that an obscure Austrian neurologist launched what was to become the most significant medical
movement in the whole of human history. In the century which has passed since, psychoanalysis has
been so deeply absorbed into our culture that we have almost forgotten that it was ever a medical
movement in the first place. The sheer speed with which this happened has sometimes made it
difficult to divine the reasons which lie behind the success of psychoanalysis. All too frequently this
success has itself been interpreted as a measure of the rightness or the revolutionary profundity of
Freuds ideas. One of the aims of this book is to suggest that the reverse of this view may be nearer
to the truth. I have tried above all to explain why a psychological system whose language and
concepts may initially seem strange and unsettling has been experienced by so many people as
familiar and reassuring.
Precisely because some people do find psychoanalytic ideas comforting, any work which criticises
Freud is liable to provoke passionate resentment. This book is no exception. For although most of
the responses to Why Freud Was Wrong on its publication in 1995 were warm and enthusiastic, a
significant number were not. In some cases these followed a traditional pattern and Freud was
defended with the kind of fierce zeal which has been customary in the psychoanalytic movement
since its beginnings. Other responses, however, were themselves tempered by a degree of
scepticism about psychoanalysis.
One of the arguments deployed by Freuds more moderate defenders suggested that to portray
psychoanalysis as a false science, as I do in this book, is to misunderstand its nature. According to
this view the whole point of psychoanalysis is that it is not a science at all; it should be judged not
as a contribution to our systematic knowledge of human nature but as a kind of poetry.
Psychoanalytic theories, therefore, can never be rejected as false and Freud, as the psychoanalyst
Adam Phillips puts it, can only be more or less inspiring, more or less interesting (The Observer,
17 September 1995). This view of Freud is certainly seductive. For by elegantly dissolving the
truth-claims which are everywhere apparent in psychoanalysis it makes it possible to evade the task
of evaluating Freuds theories critically.
Those who seek to soften and relativise psychoanalysis in this way, however, can only do so by
reinventing it. In reality it was Freud himself who triumphantly claimed the title of scientist and
who wrote that psychoanalysis has put us in a position to establish psychology on foundations
similar to those of any other science, such, for instance, as physics (SE26, p. 193-7). Freuds belief
that he was creating a genuine science remains crucial to any understanding of how psychoanalysis
developed. For, as I have tried to show in the main body of this book, it was his relentless and
reductive scientism which, harnessed to his need for fame, led him deeper and deeper into a
labyrinth of error.
It is certainly true that Freud pointed to the poets as precursors of psychoanalysis. But the whole
point of this claim was to suggest that psychoanalysis had succeeded in putting poetic insights into
human nature on an entirely different footing so that a set of mere intuitions had now been
incorporated into a hard scientific theory. If Freud had indeed succeeded in preserving these
insights, the cultural status of psychoanalysis might be well-deserved in spite of its scientific
waywardness. But one of the most damaging of all the effects which psychoanalysis has had upon
our culture is to be found in the way in which Freuds pre-eminence has helped to weaken or
neutralise many of these genuine insights under the pretext of strengthening them.
To take what is perhaps the most significant example, the idea that human behaviour is influenced
by impulses or feelings of which we sometimes remain unaware has long been a commonplace both

of vernacular and of poetic psychology. It was in the seventeenth century that Pascal observed that
The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. It was in middle of the nineteenth
century that the Goncourt brothers recorded this confession of Sainte-Beuve:
I have in my head here, or here, he tapped his cranium a drawer, a pigeonhole, that I
have always been afraid to look squarely into. All my work, all that I do, the spate of articles
that I send forth all that is explained by my desire not to know what is in that pigeon hole.
I have stopped it up, plugged it with books, so as not to have the leisure to think about it, not
to be free to come and go through it. (The Goncourt Journals, 1851-1870, Doubleday, 1953,
p. 193.)

As a matter of cultural habit we now tend to categorise such observations as Freudian. Yet the
view of unconscious motivation which has been expressed by countless writers, including Pascal
and Sainte-Beuve, was incorporated into Freuds scientific psychology only after it had been both
technicalised and medicalised. The wisdom contained in a diverse collection of fluid and
metaphorical insights was thus displaced by the scientifically spurious notion that there was actually
a mental entity called the Unconscious a biologically circumscribed area of the mind with
pathogenic power. Freud, as has long been recognised by scholars, did not invent the idea of
unconscious motivation. He did, however, empty it of many of the subtleties it had formerly
contained in order to make it into the basis of a theory of psychological medicine.
The belief that it was Freud who invented the idea of projection is similarly ill-founded. The term
itself was used in English by George Eliot in her translation of Feuerbachs The Essence of
Christianity in 1854. Theconcept of projection goes back much further, as may be seen from
Shakespeares lines in King Lear:
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand!
Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thy own back;
Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind
For which thou whipst her. (IV, vi, 157-60)

Once again, however, although Freud invoked the idea of projection, he also impoverished it by
pinning it into his own mechanistic system. Again and again Freud strangled in false science the
very poetic insights which he had glimpsed in imaginative literature. The best place to look for
these insights and to encounter them in their full richness and plenitude is not in psychoanalysis; it
is in the works of the novelists, poets, and dramatists themselves. This is not to say that such
insights cannot or should not be incorporated into systematic or scientific theories. It is simply to
suggest that Freuds own attempt to do this failed. When it comes to psychological insight the
common wealth of our literary tradition remains richer by far than psychoanalysis, and this should
be recognised more widely than it is.
Yet, partly because of the way in which he used the aura of science and of medicine to gain
intellectual authority for his ideas, Freud sometimes seems to be regarded as the only possible
source for any deep insight into human motivation. Psychoanalysis has become, in some quarters at
least, a kind of dead letter box into which any profound insight into human nature whose origins are
obscure, unknown or insufficiently scientific is automatically sorted. By extension any critique of
psychoanalysis which uses poetic, vernacular or empirically based insights in an attempt to analyse
the behaviour of Freud himself (as I do in this book), is seen by some as self-contradictory or as a
covert exercise in the very psychoanalysis it seeks to repudiate.
One of the inferences which may be drawn from such views is that many intellectuals (including
some active supporters of Freud) have managed to remain surprisingly ill-acquainted with, or
careless of, the distinctive details of Freuds own theories. These still tend to be characterised not by

their actual content so much as by the general impression that they deal with aspects of human
nature which are dark, hidden or complex. Psychoanalysis comes in consequence to be seen not as
the highly specific theory of mental functioning and sexual development which it is, but as an
affirmation of human complexity.
Wherever this attitude prevails almost any account of human nature which partakes of the necessary
complexity tends to be assimilated to psychoanalysis, and genuine psychological insights which
have no connection with Freud come to be associated with him. As a result we tend to hide the real,
historical Freud behind a mythical figure who rules over an empire of almost infinite psychological
depth and complexity. The historical reality, as I have tried to show in this book, was very different.
It is not simply that Freud lacked the extraordinary psychological insight he has conventionally
been credited with. It is that, in a number of his most crucial formulations and case histories, he
shows an almost complete lack of ordinary psychological insight and sensitivity.
The fact that some readers of the original edition of this book resisted its conclusions so fiercely
perhaps illustrates how difficult it is for us to relinquish our intellectual heroes, and to face up to the
reality of their relative intellectual poverty. But I suspect that it also illustrates something which is
more poignant, and ultimately more tragic. It illustrates how difficult we sometimes find it to come
to terms with the reality of our own relative intellectual and psychological wealth, and how much
easier it is to attribute that ordinary wealth to those we have been conditioned to revere and to
worship.