From: dyer@spdcc.com (Steve Dyer)
Subject: Re: Regrets
Organization: S.P. Dyer Computer Consulting, Cambridge MA
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1992 05:14:37 GMT

In article <92105.215647HERSCH@auvm.american.edu> Herschel Browne <HERSCH@auvm.american.edu> writes:
>To all of you who seem to think that trashing Freud is either
>in the interests of queer liberation or somehow cool in its
>own right, I really think you have taken on a silly project.
>The hostility that queer liberationists have typically found in
>Freud really isn't there to begin with. There is a massive bum
>rap being perpetrated here. I have no vested interest in Freud,
>don't find his work to be essential to the way I think, and would
>survive the excision of Freud from Western thought.

Gee, I didn't think we were trashing Freud--we were trashing
psychoanalysis as a branch of scientific psychology, and particularly
one which has both predictive and prescriptive aspects as advanced
by AAP as it reflects on gay people raising children.

>On the other hand, Freud has thousands of insights that I think
>are valuable, and that have informed a considerable body of
>scholarly work, which would have been poorer without it. Freud
>has been criticized in this thread as being unscientific. As far
>as I can tell, Freud never thought that what he was doing was
>science, as it obviously was not. Freud was a philosopher.

Bingo.

>In his time, psychology was a branch of philosophy, and that's what
>Freud did. The fact that he used empirical evidence in his philosophy
>doesn't alter its status as philosophy. And as philosophy, Freud's
>work has an immense lot to say to us.

I think you're quite right.  But not in the way AAP would hope.
Er, Herschel, did it occur to you that when you engage a moron
in argument, you're not going to be discussing subtleties?

>Some of the comments in this thread have been supremely stupid.
>Such as, that Foucault was a literary theorist. Huh?

The only person who brought up Foucault was AAP.

>Foucault was perhaps the single most brilliant thinker of our time, and
>his fields were history and philosophy, not literary theory.
>His is a tradition to cherish, not only because he was a radical
>gay activist, but because he was a genius. On the other hand,
>he wasn't a Freudian, so how he got dragged into this silly argument
>is beyond me.

Ask la otra Dolfa.  I'm not sure everyone shares your warm fuzzies
about Foucault--quite a few people think he was a charlatan.  It must
be a measure of the esteem in which he's held.

>The assertion that has been made here, that Freud is taken seriously
>by no serious scholar in any discipline outside of literary theory,
>is also easily refuted. History. You may not like history as a
>discipline, but if you dismiss it as "pas serieux", then we can
>form our judgments based on that dismissal. Those of us who know that
>Clio is the queen of the humanities know that many of her
>adherents find a great deal of value in Freud. To name the most
>obvious of them: Peter Gay. You may not care for his work, but he
>is certainly acknowledged as a master within the historical discipline,
>even by people who themselves find no value in Freudianism.

I believe I used the word psychoanalysis, and was referring to
psychoanalytic theory.  The very point is that Freud and psychoanalysis
has been banished from the psychologist's couch only to be adopted by
the academic crowd.  He lives on in scholarly journals and conferences.

>I think that this knee-jerk reaction to Freud is misplaced and misguided,
>and I wish you would all stop it.

Perhaps you were missing some context here.  That's all I can imagine.

-- 
Steve Dyer
dyer@ursa-major.spdcc.com aka {ima,harvard,rayssd,linus,m2c}!spdcc!dyer