Gary Peterson wrote in passing: >How should such accounts differ from the tainted kinds >of case notes said to typify Freud's writing?
There is concrete evidence that Freud's case notes were tainted. As students of Freud's life will know, on at least two occasions he "destroyed all his manuscripts, private diaries, notes, and correspondence" (F. Sulloway, *Freud: Biologist of the Mind*, 1979, p. 7). (The first occasion was in 1885, when he was only 28 and yet to achieve anything of consequence. In a letter to his fiancée Martha Bernays explaining his reason he wrote that he had "no desire to make it too easy" for his biographers, and that he was "already looking forward to seeing them go astray".) More specifically, Freud destroyed all his case notes for the several famous case histories that he published between 1905 and 1918. But it seems he slipped up in the case of the Rat Man, the case notes for which survived, and were published as an "Addendum" to the case history in volume 10 of the Standard Edition. The Freud and Wittgenstein scholar Frank Cioffi drew attention to an instance where the case notes were "doctored" to conform with Freud's theoretical requirements. Patrick Mahony (a supervising and training analyst in the Canadian Society of Psychoanalysts) went much further in one section of *Freud and the Rat Man*: he undertook a close comparison of the two versions and found several significant discrepancies, including a false claim that the patient had been completely cured. In his book *Freud's Dora*, Mahony wrote that “there are a series of lies in Freud’s description of the Rat Man case... and two lies in the ‘Prefatory Remarks’ to the Dora case.” Later he noted that "My book [on the Rat Man] pointed out Freud’s intentional confabulation and documented the serious discrepancies between Freud’s day-to-day process notes of the treatment and his published case history of it.” (American Journal of Psychiatry, 147: 8, Aug. 1990, p.1110) Full details of Freud's 'doctoring' of the Rat Man case notes are supplied in Chapter 4 of my book *Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud*. In Chapters 4 and 5 I also cite several instances of doctoring of the evidence to conform with what he needed in the Wolf Man case history, including the invention of a key character in a supposed recovered "memory" (conveniently occurring after four years of analysis) that enabled him to find the "solution" to the analysis. http://tinyurl.com/25nrvc Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London allenester...@compuserve.com http://www.esterson.org ---------------------------- From: peter...@svsu.edu Subject: Re: behavioral dilemma Date: Sun, 10 Oct 2010 11:57:31 -0400 (EDT) I agree, and am delighted that many seem to recognize the value of good observation and description, and the role of presumptive vantage points underlying such accounts. The class could explore the assumptions and biases involved in naive descriptions as a critical thinking exercise. How do psychologists hold in check or take into account their own biases and assumptions when conducting such observations? Here, one might bring in differences beyween informal observations and more systematic ways of observing and recording that might better characterize scientific study. Other classes might explore the role of such observations in developing research ideas. Do psychologists learn or acquire description/observational skill in grad school? How should such accounts differ from the tainted kinds of case notes said to typify Freud's writing? One would have to encourage better observation/analysis in any case, but could this also lead to lessons as to how biased observations might lead to faulty hypothesis testing? GPeterson Gary's iPad --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=5546 or send a blank email to leave-5546-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
