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How wobbly? Interestingly, Grunbaum himself thinks all is not lost, although his verdict is not entirely cheering: "I categorically don't believe Freud is dead. The question is, Are they trustworthy explanations? Have the hypotheses been validated by cogent, solid evidence? My answer to that is no."
Frank Sulloway, a visiting scholar of science history at M.I.T. and a longtime critic of Freud's methods, takes a somewhat more apocalyptic view: "Psychoanalysis is built on quicksand. It's like a 10-story hotel sinking into an unsound foundation. And the analysts are in this building. You tell them it's sinking, and they say, 'It's O.K.; we're on the 10th floor.' "
Sure enough, the view from this imaginary elevation remains largely untroubled. Psychoanalysts like to point out that their treatment is gaining converts in Spain, Italy and Latin America, plus parts of the former Soviet Union, where it had formerly been banned. Some 14,000 tourists a year flock to the Freud Museum in London, where they walk through the Hampstead house Freud owned during the last year of his life. His daughter Anna, who carried on her father's work with dedication and skill, remained there until her death in 1982. Freud's library and study, the latter containing a couch covered with an Oriental rug, remain largely as he left them. Some visitors last week may have come fresh from seeing a Channel 4 TV documentary put together by Peter Swales, another persistent critic of Freud, titled Bad Ideas of the 20th Century: Freudism. If so, their interest in Freud memorabilia seemed undiminished. Michael Molnar, the Museum's research director and an editor of Freud's diaries, acknowledges that psychoanalysis is being challenged by new drug treatments and advances in genetic research. "But," he argues, "Freud is in better shape than Marx."
Across the English Channel, a play called The Visitor, by the young French dramatist Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, has opened in Paris, featuring the octogenarian Freud and his daughter Anna as principal characters. Meanwhile, the Grand Palais is staging an exhibition called "The Soul in the Body," with objects that manifest the interplay between art and science. One of the major displays is the couch on which Freud's patients in Vienna reclined. In his leather-upholstered office a few blocks away, Serge Leclaire, 69, an ex- president of the French Society for Psychoanalysis, notes all this cultural hubbub in France and contrasts it with the assaults on Freud in the U.S. "What happened to Freudian psychoanalysis in America is the fault of American psychoanalysts," he says. "They froze things into a doctrine, almost a religion, with its own dogma, instead of changing with the times."