On 8 January 2007 Stephen Black wrote:
> And you thought Freud invented the talking cure.
I hope not! It was Josef Breuer to whom Freud attributed the origination
of the "talking cure". Or even Bertha Pappenheim ("Anna O.") as
co-discoverer.
> And while we're on the subject of psychotherapy, here's a claim for
> the earliest psychotherapy ever. "Sometimes a person's sorrow
> may be assuaged by talking." One thousand years ago.[...]
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1976879,00.html
Another fictional character who advocated talking as a cure for sorrow is
to be found in yes, you've guessed it William Shakespeare (Macbeth):
Malcolm to Macduff:
Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break
> Like Freud's cures, this one also seems to have been fictional.
Talking of which, there's a rather astonishing statement by Howard Gardner
in his review of Peter D. Kramer's new book on Freud in the Washington
Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/05/AR2007010500073.html?nav=hcmodule
"No reader of Kramer alone would appreciate the extent to which Freud airs
doubts, responds to criticisms, admits his changes of mind and presents
extensive transcripts that readers can judge for themselves."
What on earth does Gardner mean by Freud's "extensive transcripts"?
Transcripts? Can it *really* be that he means the case histories, in which
Freud told readers precisely what he wanted them to know, and in which it
is frequently impossible to discern what came from the patient and what
came from Freud. Evidently Gardner hasn't read Patrick Mahony's book on
the "Rat Man", where, as he reported in a letter to the American Journal
of Psychiatry, he "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." (Freud
destroyed all his other case notes, so we'll never know the extent this
was the same with his other famous case histories. Though for the one case
for which the patient provided information later, the Wolf Man expressed
his scepticism about Freud's main analytic claims, and derided Freud's
claim to have cured his somatic symptoms.)
As for Gardner's writing of "the extent to which Freud airs doubts,
responds to criticisms, admits his changes of mind", he seems to have
swallowed Freud's rhetoric whole. Since he is evidently incapable of
seeing it himself, Gardner should read Stanley Fish's masterly dissection
of the "Wolf Man" case history, "Withholding the Missing Portion: Power,
Meaning and Persuasion in Freud's 'The Wolf Man'." (At one point Fish, in
relation to Freud's persuasive devices, describes his achieving "a
virtuoso level of performance".) Or Gardner might try reading Chapter 12
in my own *Seductive Mirage*, with the title: "Techniques of Persuasion".
Allen Esterson
Former lecturer, Science Department
Southwark College, London
http://www.esterson.org/
References:
Esterson, A. (1993). Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of
Sigmund Freud. La Salle: Open Court.
Fish, S. (1986). "Withholding the Missing Portion: Power, Meaning and
Persuasion in Freud's 'The Wolf Man'." Times Literary Supplement, August
29 1986: 935-938. [An extended version of this essay is in *The Trial(s)
of Psychoanalysis* (1987), ed. F. Meltzer, pp. 183-209. An abbreviated
version is in *Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend* (1998), ed.
F. C. Crews, pp. 186-199.]
Mahony, P. (1986). Freud and the Rat Man. Yale University Press.
Mahony, P. (1990). Letter, American Journal of Psychiatry, 147: 8, August
1990, 1109-1110.
Obholzer, K. (1980). The Wolf Man: Sixty Years Later. Conversations With
Freud's Patient. London: Routledge.
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