The Los Angeles Times is making progress. Today, it published a refreshing and almost witty commentary on Freudianism's decline and fall. Todd Dufresne, a professor at the Northern Ontario Medical School who has written a book about the death of psychoanalysis, lays into Sigmund Freud and his die—hard supporters. Among his observations:

Freud never seriously dealt with the problem of "suggestion," which totally compromised his clinical findings and, by extension, his theories...

...the cult—like exigencies of psychoanalysis dictate that normal human suggestibility be exploited for the cause of conversion. As Karl Kraus put it many years ago, psychoanalysis itself became the poison it purports to cure.

Freud is truly in a class of his own. Arguably no other notable figure in history was so fantastically wrong about nearly every important thing he had to say....

academics have been — and still are — infinitely creative in their efforts to whitewash his errors

Best of all:

You can always count on intellectuals to keep a candle burning for whatever idea they've invested long years, enormous sums of money and, perhaps above all, limitless ego promoting.

Congratulations to the LAT! Exposing failed belief systems and the intellectually corrupt advocates who cling to them long after the harm they inflict becomes obvious, is what a great newspaper should do.

Now, how about Marxism? Talk about a belief system which proved to be based on mistaken observations, which has harmed those who accepted it, and which is now dead, yet strangely clung—to by academics (and journalists)! Let me introduce you to David Horowitz, who could write a great column on the subject.

Posted by Thomas  02 19 04