Looking back with shame

I found Pauline Collier's article (March 2023) and the apology struck a chord with me. I'm a retired clinical psychologist having qualified in 1971. I look back with shame and embarrassment at some of the things we did and supported.

I recall aversion therapy and the views of 'normal' behaviour. I recall the number of IQ tests we gave. Why?

I remember giving these terrible word-learning tests that upset poor people already worried about their memory.

I recall the acceptance of the medical model of mental distress.

What a useless lot of kowtowers we were. I cringe as I remember.

Thankfully later generations moved on, and clinical psychology is now a more respectful and respectable profession.

I wonder how many memories like this others have?

Bridie Cushion
Teignmouth

When I was a teenager I sat at the dining table with my elder brother as he drew a square box, with one arrow pointing into it and one pointing out. He declared that this was the key to understanding other people. Since my brother was the fount of all wisdom I didn't have the confidence to challenge this, but privately I thought (as I later wrote in my diary) that surely what mattered was what went on inside the person, not just what went in and came out of them.

Evidently, at the age of 14 I had more sense than the hundreds of distinguished psychologists who, over the years, were seduced into accepting a crude behavioural model of human behaviour. If this had not happened, people like Pauline Collier, who wrote in your March edition, would never have been exposed to the barbaric practice of conversion therapy.

What amazes me is that the psychologists involved were not horrified and repulsed by the sheer cruelty of the practice. Where was their empathy, their compassion and their intuitive understanding of other people?

Thankfully the profession has belatedly discovered its social conscience, at least in this country, and is developing its structures accordingly. But I fear that while it stays rigidly wed to the model of itself as a natural science it will always be vulnerable to theories and practices that ignore the humanity of its subjects. Psychology is a discipline that straddles science and humanity and we need a philosophical underpinning that recognises this.

Jenny Webb 
Chartered Psychologist
Chichester

Reading the review of Michaela Chamberlain's book Misogyny in Psychoanalysis I could not help wondering how on earth Freud has persisted for so long in psychology. He represents a miasma of insult and betrayal to women, the impact of which is impossible to calculate over the past 150 years and which, it seems from Chamberlain's book, continues today.

My guess is that the only reason for Freud's popularity was that he talked about sex, and in a way that made women seem inferior to male pride. Freud was himself a sexually frustrated cocaine addict whose mind cannot possibly have been free of a number of value judgements, especially about women. There have been several exposes of his ideas, and yet the obstinate refusal to abolish this school continues.

Perhaps if it were men who had suffered so badly as a result of his popularity he would be long gone. As it is, women have had to battle not only social inequality and abuse, but blame and insult created by theories that immediately allowed them to be even further disregarded than they already were.

To be clear: having come to the conclusion that most of his female clients had been abused within their own families he withdrew a paper to this effect for the sake of his career in a male dominated society. He then re-formed it as a wish-fulfilment fantasy in which women want to be abused and raped. He further blamed mothers for any gay tendencies in their sons, presenting these women as emasculating and dominating, whilst giving women no status in society otherwise. His lamentable 'Oedipus Complex' only added to the guilt many men feel for their mothers – who in privileged society would be torn from them as small children in order to be sent to boarding school, or brought up by a nanny figure.
 
Freud made a pathetic attempt to equal out his sexist theories by inventing a non-existent 'Electra Complex', having realised that he had forgotten about girls altogether in his theorising. His concept of 'drives' is nonsensical, and his ideas on child development have no basis at all in modern understanding of how infants and mother relate to each other in either healthy or unhealthy situations. His two most famous suggestions were stolen from ancient civilisations (transference from the early Christian Church and the Kathar practise of cleansing the body and mind (catharsis).

What does this leave? The ego structure and its critical parent, and tendency to live out past hurts unless we become aware of them. I think these ideas are now fully addressed in modern forms of psychotherapy so that we can dispense once and for all. Freud who is so tainted by association as to surely make him unbearable as well as unnecessary to any decent therapist. In short, it is time to ditch psychoanalysis.

Jennifer Poole
Romsey
Hampshire