Edition: U.S. / Global

IDEAS AND TRENDS; How Freud Shaped the 20th-Century Mind

Published: November 26, 1989

SCIENTISTS and philosophers still debate where Sigmund Freud's theories of psychoanalysis fit into the jigsaw puzzle of disciplines studying the brain and mind.

To biologists working with brain cells and psychologists analyzing experimental data, Freud's ideas of subterranean mental forces often seem musty and arcane. Are modern men and women really fated to relive the dramas of Oedipus and Electra, psychologically murdering the parent of the same sex? Even some psychiatrists feel that their more doctrinaire colleagues in psychoanalysis are seized with an ideology not a science.

Whatever their scientific status, Freud's theories about the effects of the unconscious on behavior pervade Western culture and the humanities. To observe the 50th anniversary of his death, scholars of psychoanalysis gathered in Columbia, S.C., earlier this month for a University of South Carolina symposium on Freud's impact on such fields as psychology, literary criticism and even business administration. Here are some excerpts. AN IDEOLOGY - OR A SCIENCE?

IN its early years, psychoanalysis took on an insular existence with few connections to the outside world. Even today some analysts treat concepts like the Oedipus complex as dogmas and opposing ideas as heresies. Dr. Eugene H. Kaplan, a professor of neuropsychiatry and behavioral science at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, said it was time for the field to hold itself to more rigorous standards.

What has been the impact of Freud on 20th-century thought? After 50 years we have come far enough so that we are not here to consider ''the Word.'' We're not talking about the revealed word of Sigmund Freud. And we're not here to adore or to worship or to idealize but to appreciate. And to appreciate means to savor, to critique, to discard.

I was reminded of a celebration at the time of the 100th anniversary of his birth when, I think, the title was ''The Legacy of Sigmund Freud.'' There is some passage in the Bible that says when one inherits a legacy one must then work and strive to make that legacy one's own - really to metabolize it and to absorb it. I think we're arriving at that point.

What characterizes the main theoretical developments in the last 50 years has been a decentering of the importance of the Oedipus complex. Not because the Oedipus complex isn't important but if you're starting out and the first thing you discover is the Oedipus complex, the rational way of handling that is to explain everything on the basis of the Oedipus complex.

Clearly from what we've learned about Freud's relationships and conflicts toward his own parents, he had to put emphasis on the Oedipal complex and the relationship to the father and to sidestep the relationship to the mother. Issues of relationships to the mother and the issues of narcissism are much more in the picture now. And that makes for a richer and more difficult picture. Because we have come so much further and psychoanalysis is no longer merely the institution which is the shadow of the man, what developments that have occurred do not lead anymore to heresy and schism.

What do I see for the future? Some of us have a dream that we can achieve a kind of integration. We feel that psychoanalysis has suffered almost mortally from its isolation from the university, its isolation from the other intellectual disciplines. And if it's worth saving it has to be able to stand the glare of all kinds of other study. And I think it will be lifesaving. I think there has to be an integration in which the connection is not simply to medicine and psychiatry but to the arts and the humanities. Yet I look for an integration that is not a mindless eclecticism but where there will be a development of criteria and where we can go forward with some scientific appeal. We have to have a higher court of appeal that we will all accept and it can't be simply what sounds best or who is more charismatic. FROM THE MENTAL TO THE PHYSICAL

TODAY most neuroscientists are what philosophers call strict determinists. They believe that the mind is simply what the brain does and that mental life must ultimately be determined by biology and chemistry.

Some scientists and philosophers, on the other hand, argue for a mentalist approach, holding that the mind is best studied as a thing in itself with a rule book of its own.

Dr. Robert Michels, chairman of psychiatry at Cornell University Medical School in New York, said Freud took an intermediary position, considering his theories of the mind a temporary approximation until more was learned about the brain.

A hundred years ago, Freud gave up the laboratory study of the brain to embark on a new phase in his career: the clinical, psychological study of the mind. His initial hope was to establish a scientific psychology, one that dealt with mental phenomena - with thoughts, feelings, wishes, fears, passions -and that did so not in the loose common-sense way in which we normally think about mental phenomena but with a strict, rigorous, scientific determinism that ultimately could be linked to the emerging understanding of the brain.