FALLEN INTO DISREPUTE

Evening Star, Issue 21232, 13 October 1932, Page 7

FALLEN INTO DISREPUTE

PSYCHO-ANALYSIS CULT In an arraignment of psycho-analysis Dr Genii Perrin, a French expert, blames the psycho-analysts themselves. Enlarging somewhat upon the indictment, Rene Sudre now says in ‘ Enropeen ’ (Paris) that we must get firmly into our heads the Freudian procedure or we shall miss the point of all recent criticism. He writes:— “ Psycho-analysis, as Freud- teaches it, is a mode of dealing with certain neurotic states by exploring and exposing their secret origins. “Now, relations thus implied between two persons of different sexes, one of the individuals having the weight of authority, can cause peril of a kind easily surmised. It is not unlike the peril of former days when magnetiser and patient were of different sexes. “ Psycho-analysis from a medical standpoint has somewhat the aspects of hypnotism. It creates a sentimental relationship which is almost the condition of its success. “ It will fall into the same discredit after it has rendered somewhat the same sort of service. “Psycho-analysis will not thereafter be cultivated except by some obstinate devotees and some charlatans. “ Thus is brought about the penalty imposed upon a kind of therapy which, in spite ot some justification, trifles too cynically with the moral conventions. “ The psychiatry of France repudiates Freudianism as the inevitable and sufficient explanation of neurotic states. This is not the effect of any squeamish delicacy, which would be unthinkable in medicine. ' “French experts do not deem Freudian psycho-analysis generally effective. “ A high authority has declared that instead of healing it really aggravates the ill—a malady of the mind that would have been helped by other less inconsiderate treatments. “ Confronted with a patient, the psy-cho-analyst at once pries into the intimate antecedents of the case and he always finds these present. “ Where is the man or the woman who has not had in childhood or during adolescence experiences more or less dissembled without sustaining through these a shock or a sensitiveness really defined? 15y dragging such things into the light of day and ascribing to them a prominent part in the present complication, the psycho-analyst runs the risk of frustrating his own purpose, and of complicating a nervous state due, perhaps, to other causes. “This is what two great French authorities, Hesnard and Genii Perrin, say emphatically : “A defective analysis may further trouble the debilitated. It may instil a sense of indignity sustained or fortify scruples in the minds of the obsessed. “These views arc shared by most psychiatrists. The psycho-analytical mode of treatment is not any more accepted as ‘ inoffensive.’ “ One expert—a Freudian neverthe-less—-has recorded instances in which a sound and an unsound diagnosis have had like disastrous results. “ To charge the mind of a perfectly moral character, for instance, with a theory that his difficulty is due to an ‘ incestuous complex ’ might drive him into a pernicious melancholia, or even to suicide. “ On the other hand, to seek to persuade a man that ho is actuated by such and such an obscure feeling is to lead him to make this feeling real, even if the psycho-analyst be in error.”