Synopsis
A mustering of 18 opposition stalwarts who accuse the master of being a dogmatist who browbeat his patients and consistently failed to distinguish between their fantasies and his own, and accuse his child, psychoanalysis, of offering no credible evidence for the top-heavy Freudian system of mental laws and powers. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
Reviews
Here are 20 rigorous essays that mount a formidable critique of mainstream Freudian theory and practice, and of Freud's major cases. Whereas Freud fostered the idea of solitary, heroic discovery through his self-analysis, in reality, the authors contend, he taught his followers to replace the empirical attitude with blind loyalty and censorship, instilling in them a negative, quasi-paranoid view of rival theorists and clinicians. The contributors?among them Frank J. Sulloway, Ernest Gellner, Peter J. Swales and other noted American and European scholars in fields ranging from philosophy to neuroscience?present compelling evidence that Freud habitually and greatly exaggerated his therapeutic successes. They also cast serious doubt on new Freudians' confidence in free association as a curative tool to decipher the meaning of dreams or to reconstruct events from a patient's distant past. Freud's attempt to fit women (whom he apparently viewed as second-class humans) into his "castration-based" account of the mind is seen as having disastrous consequences, such as assumptions of "normal" female masochism or women's moral and cultural weakness. Although the book as a whole overstates its case, Crews, eminent literary critic, satirist and professor emeritus at U.C.-Berkeley, has done such an excellent job of choosing and editing the selections?all of which have been previously published, mainly in academic books and periodicals?that they form a cohesive whole, and as such put psychoanalysis squarely on the defensive. Agent, Frederick Crews.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
At midcentury, Freud's standing as a seminal thinker seemed ensured but, over the past 30 years, critics have challenged the man himself, elements of his theory, even whether Freudian theory is a scientific theory or (as the introduction cites medicine Nobelist Sir Peter Medawar as observing) "a stupendous intellectual confidence trick." Crews, a University of California, Berkeley, emeritus English professor, tends toward Medawar's view, offered to readers in the form of essays and book excerpts from 17 scholars--including Frank Cioffi, Adolf Grunbaum, Ernest Gellner, and Stanley Fish--which "take the full measure," his preface urges, "of Freud's well-documented conceptual errors, relentless apriorism, disregard for counterexamples, bullying investigative manner, shortcuts of reasoning, rhetorical dodges, and all-around chronic untruthfulness." The essays Crews collects challenge much of what he calls "the Freud legend," discuss inadequacies of Freud's (shifting) methodologies in both scientific and therapeutic terms, and consider the consequences of Freudian therapy's "sense of militant exclusiveness." Mary Carroll
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