Synopsis
In this engrossing new study of Sigmund Freud's life and work, Richard Webster has set out to provide a clear answer to the controversies that have raged for a century around one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. Tracing Freud's essentially religious personality to his childhood, Webster shows how the founder of psychoanalysis allowed his messianic dreams to shape the ”science” he created and to lead him ever deeper into a labyrinth of medical error. Meticulously researched and powerfully argued, Why Freud Was Wrong is destined to become a classic work.
Reviews
In a formidable critique of Freud's theories and modern psychoanalytic practice, English journalist Webster argues that Freud's mentor, French neurologist Jean Charcot, misdiagnosed as traumatic hysteria what were actually cases of injury-related brain damage and epilepsy. Misled by this error, Freud, in Webster's opinion, himself misdiagnosed many of his early cases, seeking to explain physical ailments or illnesses with recourse to patients' childhood emotional traumas. To Webster, psychoanalysis, for all its rationalism and professed secularism, is a "crypto-theological system," a modernized reworking of traditional Judeo-Christian morality, sexual realism and restraint. He portrays Freud as the founder of a messianic movement that placed at its core a confessional ritual: the therapy session. Freud's hero-worship of crackpot Berlin physician Wilhelm Fliess, his demonizing of dissidents such as Alfred Adler and Carl Jung, his inflating of successful therapeutic results and his overbearing, aggressive, even prosecutorial attitude toward his patients come under scrutiny. Yet, though Webster calls psychoanalysis a pseudoscience, he contends that it nevertheless has yielded productive insights about human nature and society because of its internal logic, sophistication and emotional nuance.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
This powerful, incisive rendering of Freud as a pseudo-scientist with a compulsive need for fame is supported by extensive research. Evidence indicates that Freud began his career by publishing a paper on cocaine therapy that presented conclusions he knew to be false and dangerously misleading; that his almost invariable diagnoses of hysteria for an endless assortment of complaints, readily diagnosed today as symptoms of organic disease or trauma, had no scientific validity; and that he could concoct sexual signification, no matter how whimsical, for any symptom or dream. Patients who rejected such sexual fabrications were "in denial," thus anticipating contemporary allegations. Webster notes the resemblances of psychoanalytic doctrine to religious beliefs in original sin and confession, and he likens Freud and his disciples to a messianic cult wherein heterodoxy was not tolerated; heretics, such as Adler and Jung, were expelled and ruthlessly attacked. Absorbing, readable, and highly recommended. Brenda Grazis
Journalist Webster explores the thesis that Freud misdiagnosed his early hysteria patients?essentially founding psychoanalysis on a false premise. Moreover, he likens the psychoanalytic movement to a religious cult, with Freud, the messianic figure, rigidly controlling its development. And, using Freud as examplar, Webster reveals what he considers to be a cryptic Judeo-Christian ethos embedded in the foundations of the scientific world view. The author doesn't address an essential point, however: at its inception, psychoanalysis did add a critical dimension to a growing theory of human behavior and spirituality, which included Darwin's work and continued with Jung's. Still, Webster's readable book presents an effective argument, rivaling Henri Ellenberger's The Discovery of the Unconscious (Basic Bks., 1970). Recommended for larger collections.?Dennis G. Twiggs, Winston-Salem, N.C.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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