Acceso usuarios
Alfonso Martínez Taboas
In his writings, Freud defended the position that he was not an armchair theorist but a clinical investigator who used his patients´s experiences to make a contribution to the understanding of their dysfunctions. In an important essay published in 1937 Freud espoused the analogy between an archeologist and a psychoanalyst. The analogy is based on the premise that both are trained to uncover hidden pieces of important material and then connect them to form a "truthful" and "veridical" image of the past. In this article I critically examine Freud´s assertion that through his techniques and methodology he could unearth a "truthful" vision of his patient´s past and a proper understanding of their symptoms. To do his I Scrutinized in detail the process of such "mentalistic excavations" and found them unconvincing and methodologically unsound. Specifically, I present evidence that strongly suggest that Freud not only used a very defective methodology, but that he also, tacitly and iatrogenically, induced in his patients many of the "memories" and "discourses" that he took as confirming his etiological theories. I conclude by pointing out that apparently, in his zeal to advance the psychoanalytic cause, Freud minimized and overlooked the fact that his expectancies and clinical bias were molding the configuration of his patients verbalizations.
