No profession on Earth moves to protect its turf more rapidly or more vigorously than psychiatry. When I recently wrote a rather unexceptionable critique of counsellors who create massive human misery in their slavish adherence to the madder theories of Sigmund Freud, I expected that one or two practitioners would be detailed to deal with me. I was not disappointed.
One Albrecht Stadler, DipPsych, director, Alfred Adler Institute in Munich, wrote on the letters page on August 14th that I don't know anything "about the development of psychoanalysis and dynamic psychotherapy after Freud".
Even if true, it is unclear what this has to do with my capacity to deconstruct Freudian ideology, still less warn about the mindless adherence to it a century on, resulting in the destruction of lives and families.
Albrecht Stadler then played what he clearly imagined was a card likely to ingratiate him with right-thinking Irish people.
The way I described Freud, he declared, "the person who had a major impact on the ways of thinking in the 20th century (not only on medicine and psychotherapy but also on philosophy, literature and literary criticism) reminds me of people who, for instance, talk abusively about the character of James Joyce without any reference to his importance as a writer".
He appears unaware that most Irish people have never read a sentence by James Joyce. Moreover, "experts" do not sit in consulting rooms asking people about their Joycean "dreams of well-filled hoses", interpreting the responses as evidence of sexual abuse, and destroying families on the strength of such nonsense.
My article was about a man who lost his family, reputation and five years of his life because a "counsellor" said his son's drawing of a balloon represented a condom.
If the issue was Freud's contribution to literature or philosophy, I would have no difficulty acknowledging his stature.
If his ideas were treated like those of Friedrich Nietzsche or the Marquis de Sade, there would be no cause for concern about their more ludicrous aspects. It is because Freud's ideas are promoted as a science that a problem arises.
As Frederick Crews wrote in the New York Review of Books in 1993, Freud was "highly cultivated, sophisticated and endowed with extraordinary literary power, sardonic wit and charm, but he was also quite lacking in the empirical and ethical scruples that we would hope to find in any responsible scientist, to say nothing of a major one".
The fact that huge elements of our university, social services, family law and criminal justice systems are in the grip of Freudian palaver should cause us to shiver in our boots.
This is why we need to blow the whistle not just on Freud but on the entire theory and practice of psychoanalysis. (Interesting choice of metaphor, Mr Waters; did perhaps your father or some other male authority figure ever ask you to "blow his whistle"? Mmmm.)
Frederick Crews, among many other enlightened members of the psychiatric profession, have identified inter alia the following cracks in the legacy of Siqmund Freud: that Freud turned hunches and plagiarised ideas into scientific certainties; that his perceptions and diagnoses were always selfserving, and shifted with the exigencies of the moment; that he lied about his therapeutic successes, which were non-existent; that he disregarded the principal threat to psychoanalytic "knowledge", in the form of the contaminating effect of the therapist's suggestion; that he failed to maintain the necessary demarcation between his own obsessions and the alleged obsession of his patients; that his coercive tactics with his patients rendered worthless their constructed "histories" and his analyses; that he approved of the creation of a "cult of Freudianism" and the studied insinuation of a scientific-medico basis for what was no more than wild speculation; that his ideas are self-contained, disconnected from other branches of science and insulated from common sense.
Even so, many of Freud's ideas per se were brilliant, inspiring and beautiful. As metaphor they work exquisitely; as science they are dangerous.
While seeking to rubbish me for questioning Freud, Albrecht Stadler urged us to "leave Freud where he is. . .and take a look at the enormous development of psychoanalytic theory which has taken place since the second World War".
In this sentence, he revealed his true purpose: to defend his own patch, for which the leasehold unfortunately resides with Freud. Because you cannot have psychoanalysis without Freud, modern psychoanalysts would like to retain their guru, in soft focus, in the background.
"As a practising psychoanalyst and psychotherapist", wrote Mr Stadler, "my work is a recognised form of therapy, among others, within the medical profession in Germany. Analytic psychotherapy has been funded by public health insurance since 1967. The training for psychotherapists is professionally organised".
This is precisely why we should be concerned: authorities accept Freudian voodoo as raw truth.
He went on: "The German authorities might well support a bunch of charlatan psychotherapists for a while, but I don't suppose they would do so for long. I expect that the Irish psychoanalytic profession is developing in the same way".
Tell that to the children whose fathers are in jail because of their drawings of steam trains.
jwaters@irish-times.ie