Psychology: The Brain, The Person, The World Book

I think Gellner is at his best when he narrows his focus. The subject matter of Plough, Sword, and Book: The Structure of Human History is really too vast to be amenable to his breezy, essayistic style. By contrast, in this book and his work on Wittgenstein, he's able to achieve great force by picking a specific target and then attacking from avariety of different angles.

It's possible to debunk Freud and the movement he founded from an Enlightenment perspective. While today there is no non-controversial definition of what constitutes a science, nonetheless it's still true that psychoanalysis was never a serious candidate. Gellner relishes the chance to expose its absurdities; its heads-I-win-tails-you-lose epistemology, its cult-like organizational structure, its failure to cure patients, or even coherently define what a cure would look like.

All of which is fairly old hat at this point. In many respects Freud is a far easier adversary than Wittgenstein. These days hardly anyone takes Freud's claims seriously as he oringinally intended them. The real value of Gellner's book lies in his attempt to explain why they ever gained such wide influence in our culture.

As with many cultural and sociological phenomena, a proper understanding must begin with an evaluation of our Enlightenment heritage. Here Gellner is most insightful and provocative. An extremely fruitful tension runs throughout his work. While he himself is a liberal, proud of the intellectual accomplishments of science and the social amelioration of technology, nonetheless he's far from offering an uncritical celebration. The vision of human nature bequeathed by such thinkers as David Hume and Adam Smith is not only false but wholly bloodless and uninspiring. We simply do not go through life as judicious accountants balancing out pleasant and unpleasant sensations. Everyone already knows this intuitively, and so for many Freud's darker vision strikes a sympathetic chord.

Moreover, while it greatly improved the material conditions of humankind, modern post-scarcity society also brought along an enormous void in meaning. Rather than simply go away, anxiety became overwhelmingly social and cultural instead of physical. Neither classic liberalism nor Marxism had been able to anticipate the dimensions of this spiritual crisis. As modernity had largely discredited or marginalized religion, the old clergy were of little solace. Thus the way was paved for Freud and his new secular priesthood.

I find Gellner's account largely convincing. His book leaves me wondering to what extent his critique can be broadened to apply to our current cultural moment. Freud has largely been left behind, yet I for one am not at all convinced he has been supersede by something more scientific. It's easy to laugh at the fact that psychoanalysis was never able to outperform spontaneous remission as a cure for neurosis. But what of the fact that independent research has shown anti-psychotic medication actually decreases the schizophrenic's chances for recovery? (See this extremely valuable book for details Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill) Our culture would seem to have a deep-seated need for a well-established science and medicine of mental health. The fact that this desire has persisted through one failure after another ought to tell us something about ourselves.