Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionII. Psychodynamic
Theories(^66) 2. Freud: Psychoanalysis © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2009
Bruno Bettelheim (1982, 1983) was also critical of Strachey’s translations. He
contended that the Standard Edition used precise medical concepts and misleading
Greek and Latin terms instead of the ordinary, often ambiguous, German words that
Freud had chosen. Such precision tended to render Freud more scientific and less hu-
manistic than he appears to the German reader. For example, Bettelheim, whose in-
troduction to Freud was in German, believed that Freud saw psychoanalytic therapy
as a spiritual journey into the depths of the soul (translated by Strachey as “mind”)
and not a mechanistic analysis of the mental apparatus.
As a result of Freud’s 19th-century German view of science, many contempo-
rary writers regard his theory-building methods as untenable and rather unscientific
(Breger, 2000; Crews, 1995, 1996; Sulloway, 1992; Webster, 1995). His theories
were not based on experimental investigation but rather on subjective observations
that Freud made of himself and his clinical patients. These patients were not repre-
sentative of people in general but came mostly from the middle and upper classes.
Apart from this widespread popular and professional interest, the question re-
mains: Was Freud scientific? Freud’s (1915/1957a) own description of science per-
mits much room for subjective interpretations and indefinite definitions:
We have often heard it maintained that sciences should be built up on clear and
sharply defined basic concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact,
begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists
rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and
correlate them. Even at the stage of description it is not possible to avoid applying
certain abstract ideas to the material in hand, ideas derived from somewhere or
other but certainly not from the new observations alone. (p. 117)
Perhaps Freud himself left us with the best description of how he built his the-
ories. In 1900, shortly after the publication of Interpretation of Dreams,he wrote to
his friend Wilhelm Fliess, confessing that “I am actually not at all a man of science,
not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but
a conquistador—an adventurer... with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity char-
acteristic of a man of this sort” (Freud, 1985, p. 398).
Although Freud at times may have seen himself as a conquistador, he also be-
lieved that he was constructing a scientific theory. How well does that theory meet
the six criteria for a useful theory that we identified in Chapter 1?
Despite serious difficulties in testing Freud’s assumptions, researchers have
conducted studies that relate either directly or indirectly to psychoanalytic theory.
Thus, we rate Freudian theory about average in its ability to generate research.
Second, a useful theory should be falsifiable.Because much of the research ev-
idence consistent with Freud’s ideas can also be explained by other models, Freudian
theory is nearly impossible to falsify. A good example of the difficulty of falsifying
psychoanalysis is the story of the woman who dreamed that her mother-in-law was
coming for a visit. The content of his dream could not be a wish fulfillment because
the woman hated her mother-in-law and would not wish for a visit from her. Freud
escaped this conundrum by explaining that the woman had the dream merely to spite
Freud and to prove to him that not all dreams are wish fulfillments. This kind of rea-
soning clearly gives Freudian theory a very low rating on its ability to generate fal-
sifiable hypotheses.
60 Part II Psychodynamic Theories