Mario Livio, in his book “Brilliant Blunders”, addresses the subject of how the mistakes that genius scientists make actually advance scientific knowledge.  He goes so far as to say that science cannot progress without  these brilliant blunders. Unfortunately, Livio spends very little time  on the blunders of Sigmund Freud; only one sentence to be precise, very little time indeed. At that, the blunders Livio addresses are minor aspects of Freud’s thinking—the first half of the sentence on the death instinct  and the Oedipal complex in the second.( As an aside,  I had to laugh when after trashing Freud’s theories, Livio used the Freudian concept of the mechanisms of defense to explain astrophysicist Fred Hoyle’s denial that his theory was wrong.) To my mind, Freud’s most brilliant insight is delineated in his first book entitled, “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life”. To put it simply, Freud believed that all behavior is motivated. He used the common mistakes people make everyday to show there are no such things as mistakes.  Freud believed that our behavior is controlled by inner forces that we are not aware of nor are we in control of.  Freud called this force the unconscious and used slips of the tongue, accidents and forgetting things like locking our keys inside the car (a mistake that Livio cites as a common mistake but fascinatingly doesn’t  connect it to Freud’s theory) to infer its existence.

To my mind, Freud’s biggest blunder was his hubris.  The great man  was arrogant.  Freud believed that because he was so brilliant, the rules about appropriate boundaries of psychoanalytic treatment (don’t treat anyone that you know personally) that  he established for other psychotherapists to abide by, didn’t apply to him. If all behavior is motivated, then all   behavior has consequences. Altering the frame of treatment, changes the treatment and contaminates the transference.  Freud’s failure to recognize the impact of his own behavior was  his greatest blunder.

 

This self-deluded  thinking led to the development of iatrogenic symptoms in those clinicians that he simultaneously treated and trained.  Probably the most famous example is that of Victor Tausk.  Tausk  was a contemporary of Freud, a student and intellectual rival. Freud analyzed his favorite students; Tausk wasn’t one of them. Tausk committed suicide when Freud refused to analyze him and sent him instead to his protégé, Helene Deutsch.   The tradition of dual relationships that he initiated at his training institute, continues to this day with the concomitant negatives treatment reactions, at institutes that greedily and  uncritically pass along Freud’s blunder and continue to  think there are no consequences to altering the treatment frame. Unlike the blunders of Livio’s genius scientists, where there are few  real life consequences to us common folk, the consequences of Freud’s blunder, and that of his contemporary followers, is quite real.  Thankfully, there are many clinicians that do abide by Freud’s original dictum to avoid dual relationships with patients.  As with any business, and   psychotherapy is definitely a business as much as it is a healing profession, Caveat Emptor applies.