Sigmund Freud

A book has just come out in France which is causing one hell of a stink among the men in white coats. It is called the "Black Book of Psychotherapy" and it is an 800-page diatribe against Sigmund Freud. So what's new, you may rejoin. In the US and Britain, it is years since the teachings of the bearded Viennese came under sustained fire. So much of his work has been discredited that the couch-and-notebook school of psychiatry is now almost a thing of the past. It has been more or less replaced in the Anglo-Saxon world by so-called cognitive-behaviour therapy (CBT) -- which has a scientifically proven success rate in dealing with depression, phobias and other disorders. But in France ... I need hardly go on. Here Freudian psychoanalysis remains the norm. Some 70 percent of psychiatrists use it in their treatment, and Freudism dominates the teaching hospitals. By contrast CBT is practised by a strict minority. Hence the row. the book's authors accuse Freudians of holding back mental health care in France by decades. They say the very high levels of tranquilliser consumption in France are the result of the failures of psychotherapy -- and the lack of any alternative. They say that up to 10,000 heroine addicts may have unnecessarily died because Freudians disapproved of methadone and other replacements. They say the lives thousands of mothers of autistic children have been destroyed because they were told by Freudians that it was their fault. And they say that only last year the Freudians succeeded in suppressing an official report that found that CBT actually worked and should be encouraged. The Freudians in their turn are furious at the calumny. For them cognitive-beahviour therapy is a superficial and dehumanising way of conditioning patients into becoming "useful" members of society again. At least Freudian psychotherapy tries to understand the inner meaning of mental illness, they say, rather than merely addressing the symptoms. Put simply: CBT = Anglo-Saxon "productivism" = bad.