They rail: Psychoanalysis is not a science; it is not verifiable; it is not falsifiable; its hypotheses are circular; its treatments too long, its cost prohibitive, its outcomes uncertain.... While these disparagements irk me, and some really irk me, I can tolerate them. Listening to the oft-repeated charges against psychoanalysis, I know that there are certain truths to them, and that these truths are ones that the contemporary psychoanalytic community is under considerable and reasonable pressure to respond to. At base, these criticisms irk me, but they spur me too, they make me think of the words of a favorite cartoon character of my childhood, Super Chicken: “You knew the job was dangerous when you took it.”

That said, I had a very different response to material I’ve come across recently in which psychoanalysis was taken to task for its reputed sins. I was disturbed. I was angered. I took it personally. Why did I have such an intense response to this latest round of railings? In part because of the forum in which I found them: the popular media.

In recent months, I have been struck by what I have come to see as a trend of casual Freud bashing, to put it bluntly, in the popular media. What I found were not so much diatribes against psychoanalysis, but rather, passing remarks rejecting psychoanalytic theory and practice in articles written in newspapers and magazines that I usually rely on for depth and meaning in these often vapid times. What bothered me so about these remarks was not so much that they were made – we are all entitled to our opinions – but that they were often presented as statements of some previously agreed upon fact: namely, that Freud is dead and the world is a better place for it.

When I refer to the presence of Freud bashing in popular media, I am not referring to the writings of such avowed Freud bashers as Frederick Crews. I have grown somewhat accustomed to Crews’s aspersions that “psychoanalysis has no more standing than astrology or palmistry” in the pages of The New York Review of Books. I have even come to take some pleasure in Crews’s railings. Crews is a Freud basher, but he would likely embrace such a title.

This other trend in Freud-bashing is also distinct from the ways in which the media at times reflects society’s fascination and suspicion of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. I am not speaking of the smart, sexy (and increasingly marginal) character of Dr. Melfi on "The Sopranos," or of Brenda’s rapacious psychiatrist mother on "Six Feet Under," or even of a recent Al Italia campaign urging readers to “Fire our therapists” and eat large cones of gelato in Italy. These representations, though pervasive and powerful, speak more to our ambivalence as a society with uncertain explorations. I am speaking more to a sort of wholesale swallowing of paternalistic Dr. Phil’s smug mantra: “Analysis is paralysis.”

Here are a few recent examples of the kind of Freud bashing that raises my hackles.

In the 2004 The Lives They Lived issue of The New York Times’ Magazine, Lauren Slater wrote a brief biography of the woman who named and defined premenstrual syndrome, Katharina Dalton. In the piece, Slater champions Dalton for her valiant efforts towards the recognition and legitimization of a phenomenon many women experience as a part of their menstrual cycle as firmly rooted in biology and not as evidence of women’s weaker constitutions or their tendencies toward hysteria. So far, so good. As a woman who came of age into a world outfitted with tampons and Midol, I appreciated being reminded how women in our culture have gained in the past century. But, then Slater makes a swipe that threw me. She praises Dalton for having “saved women from Father Freud, from sticky ids and vapors.” Father Freud? Sticky ids? Surely psychoanalysis during the first half of the last century had a paternalistic and patronizing stance towards women, but it was not alone. I don’t know what a sticky id is, but I don’t think I want one.

Also in The New York Times appeared an obituary of Julius Axelrod, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist and City College graduate who conducted groundbreaking research that was vital to the development of SSRIs. At the end of the article appears a sparse description of a 1987 new conference at which Axelrod was baldly asked whether Sigmund Freud was “dead.” Axelrod’s cheeky response was, “Not for people who want to spend their money on psychoanalysis, but for the treatment of severe mental illness, yes, he is.” Now at one level, I understand that this exchange is recounted in order to convey how dramatically Axelrod’s contributions altered the field of mental health. But, at another, its inclusion concerns me. What does it mean to ask the question: Is Freud dead? What assumptions does the inclusion of this anecdote – without any sort of contextualizing comment, without any sort of indication that the treatment of serious mental illness exclusively through medication is far from proven – reflect about how psychoanalysis is considered in contemporary society? I read this anecdote as a tacit response to my latter question: It isn’t.

In the September 20, 2004 issue of The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell has an article about personality tests used by employers to assess their employees in which he describes his own experience with the Thematic Apperception Test. He shares several of his smart responses to the images; the assessment of his performance by Lon Gieser, the psychologist who administered the test; as well as his disagreement with that assessment. The T.A.T. in Gladwell’s hands seems, more than anything, uselessly subjective. However, it is in one of his final comments on the T.A.T. that he articulates his fantasy that there is something fundamentally coercive about psychoanalysis. He writes: “I'm sure Gieser would be happy to put me on the couch for a year to explore those themes and see which of his initial hypotheses had any validity.” It comes as little surprise to learn that Gladwell’s latest book, Blink, currently high atop The New York Times bestseller list, is an examination of “rapid cognition,” which he understands as the “perfectly” rational thinking that occurs in a split second of exposure to a stimuli, before emotions enter and muddy the equation. According to Gladwell, analysis -- psycho- or otherwise -- is not only useless, but potentially undermining.

There are more where these come from. I’ve started compiling a file.

As I write this I notice that I am only citing New York-based sources. Here you have a window onto my preferences in periodicals, and I don’t pretend to have conducted a thorough lit search in preparing for this editorial. But there is something ironic and distressing about coming across these expressions of anti-Freud sentiment in the New York press. Isn't New York a home of sorts for psychoanalysis? What must they be saying about psychoanalysis in Ohio? Are they saying anything at all? Confronted with these slights and dismissals, this tacit Freud-bashing, I wonder about the ways in which they seem to reflect a societal consensus that Freud is dead. I wonder about the ways in which they might hasten Freud to the grave. I wonder about their impact on the larger public perception of psychoanalysis, and the implications of that perception on those who seek out psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

But, more than anything, I am left wondering a version of the question that dogs our community when we consider the issue of evidence-based treatments: What (if any) responsibility do we, as members of the psychoanalytic community, have to respond to Freud-bashing? Should we be sending off angry missives to the editors of The New York Times? Psychoanalytic theorists made some sweeping and wrong pronouncements during the salad days of psychoanalysis, but psychoanalysis has from its inception constantly been examining and redefining itself, and in so doing has come to grapple with many of its errors and its shortcomings. This growth and change is hardly reflected in the popular media. There psychoanalysis too often remains the domain of “sticky ids and vapors,” stagnant and dead. In this light, is it our responsibility, as members of the contemporary psychoanalytic community to respond to the dismissals and distortions we encounter in the press? Does it fall to us to convey that psychoanalysis is alive and kicking?

Psychoanalysis once inspired passionate diatribes against it. With the exception of Frederick Crews, this is no longer the case. What I find so troubling about the current form of Freud-bashing is that the popular media has assumed a flat-line. Within the psychoanalytic community, I think we have clung to Auden’s line about Freud “as a whole climate of opinion” for too long, assuming the inadvertent affirmation within these dismissals when it may no longer be there. I see it then as our responsibility, as the newest generation of psychoanalytically oriented psychologists, to remind the popular media that psychoanalytic theory and practice are in a constant state of reassessment, change and growth. It falls to us to say, in effect: We’ve got a pulse.