The Way To Will-Power by Henry Hazlitt

Author:Henry Hazlitt [Henry Hazlitt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61016-111-4
Publisher: E.P. Dutton & Company
Published: 2007-11-06T16:00:00+00:00

XI

WILL AND THE PSYCHOANALYSTS

PRACTICALLY within the last few years there has grown up a body of doctrine, gradually becoming surrounded with a formidable literature, which its proponents call a “science”; and I shall not start an argument at the very beginning by denying its title to that word. This body of doctrine is called “psychoanalysis.” It is not quite clear whether its adherents consider it a branch of psychology or a competitor. But at all events, it has just now become ubiquitous. It is in the air. It is the fad. It has come out of the laboratories into the drawing rooms, out of the consulting rooms into the newspapers. It is discussed by doctors and book-reviewers and spinsters and school girls. It deals with human action, with the mind, the will, the desires, it lays down recommendations; and any modern book upon the will, though it may embrace or damn psychoanalysis, cannot afford to ignore it.

Now it is very difficult to pass fair judgment upon this body of doctrine. It is so young. It has already, to my mind, made not unimportant steps in the treatment and cure of insanity and nervous diseases, and bids fair to make greater. Its theories of multiple personalities and the meaning of dreams seem to me fruitful working hypotheses, determined to add to the achievements of psychiatry. Its explanations of Puritanism and of certain phases of war psychology, utterly apart from the question of whether or not they have scientific value, are delicious and effective bits of satire; and, as with Thorstein Veblen’s work in economics, the satire is heightened, not diminished, by the dry, scientific vocabulary in which it is wrapped and the impartial scientific attitude which it affects.

Psychoanalysis, doubtless, is proceeding on many wrong theories, and as time goes on the bad will cast upon the scrap-heap and new and better theories substituted. It is tapping and specializing upon a vein which the academic psychology had neglected. It has attracted wide popular interest. It has brought controversy into psychology; and controversy, with experiments to prove or disprove, always means life and growth and progress, and is the enemy of stagnation. It is true that the literature of psychoanalysis is morbid, gruesome, depressing; filled with sexual perversions, with incest, sadism, masochism, onanism, sodomy; but what would you? Medical books on physical diseases are also horrible—but necessary. Spiritual scabs and ravages and pus are more revolting than physical—but like the physical, if we are to combat them, we must study them with the cold detached impartiality of the physician. We must for the moment put aside our moral platitudes and denunciations and contempt and study the disease and its cure. The physician does not denounce his patient for becoming ill, though the patient may well deserve it. He seeks first to restore health. Admonition can only follow.

But when I have said all this in favor of psychoanalysis, I have said almost as much as I conscientiously can. Few of its practitioners are well-grounded in psychology, and fewer in biology and medicine.

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