Crews’ vs. Freud’s need for Certainty

Click  Here to Read: Physician Heal Thyself   Part I by Frederick Crews in the New Review of  Books September 29. , 2011.

Click Here to Read:  Physician Heal Thyself   Part II by Frederick Crews in the New Review of  Books October 13, 2011.

Crews’ vs. Freud’s need for Certainty
By William J. Massicotte and Harold J. Bursztajn

 On Crews’ Physician, Heal Thyself: the scientific studies showing clinical effectiveness for the psychodynamic psychotherapies have detached the issue from Freud the person.[1]. Within Crew’s piece Freud’s discovery of countertransference attitudes are implicitly mentioned when discussing Freud’s own occasional unhelpful attitudes towards patients. One condition required for effectiveness is the management of countertransference, including both consciously rationalized and unconsciously motivated desires for diagnostic and therapeutic certainty, which shadow much of clinical and medical practice.[2] In psychoanalytically informed therapy, when countertransference is not recognized and managed this becomes one predictor of therapeutic failure.[3]

Freud himself quite often changed his mind both about theory, the causes if his patients’ suffering, and how best to be of help.  We continue to learn with our patients’ help. Crews’rehash of his own clever, nowcocaine focused, ad hominemcertainties as to Freud’s cocaine use being responsible for the limitations in Freud’s theories, arefantasies reminiscent of Newton’s religious and alchemistic views being held responsible for the limitations of Newtonian mechanics on the quantum level.  By way of full disclosure neither of the authors below is a cocaine or opiate user.

 

William J. Massicotte Ph.D., FIPA

Co-Chair, Public Information Committee, International Psychoanalytical

Association

Montreal West, CANADA

 

Harold J. Bursztajn, M.D.

Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry

Harvard Medical School

Cambridge, Ma USA