I saw an interesting review of a book about Sigmund Freud in The _London Review of Books_ (go to: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n08/borc2208.htm). The review, entitled "How a Fabrication Differs from a Lie" was written by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen. He reviews a book by Han Israëls, which was published seven years ago in Dutch and recently translated into German (and apparently soon to be translated into English), that asks the grand question, "Was Freud a liar?" Below is an excerpt from the review. Jeff ----------------------------------- "One after another, historians of psychoanalysis have come forward to show us that things did not happen in the way Freud and his authorised biographers told us. No, Anna O.'s 'talking cure' never was the 'great therapeutic success' later vaunted by Freud. No, Breuer in no way denied the role of sexuality in the neuroses. No, Freud was not as intellectually isolated as he claimed, and the reactions of his colleagues were far from being unfavourable at the beginning. On the contrary, many of them - notably his friend Fliess - had a deep interest in sexuality, including infantile sexuality. Wrong again that Freud's patients ever spontaneously told him pseudo-memories of infantile sexual seduction: it was Freud himself who extorted these scenes of perversion, despite the patients' vehement protests. Freud had lied to us; we could no longer trust him. The era of suspicion had begun. Suddenly, scholars started to notice that he disguised fragments of his self-analysis as 'objective' cases, that he concealed his sources, that he conveniently antedated some of his analyses, that he sometimes attributed to his patients 'free associations' that he himself made up, that he inflated his therapeutic successes, that he slandered his opponents. Some even go so far as to suggest - supreme lèse-majesté - that Sigmund cheated on his wife with his sister-in-law Minna. The defenders of psychoanalysis are indignant and speak of gutter-press journalism, of paranoia, of 'Freud bashing', but they are obviously on the defensive. "It is one thing, however, to plumb the depths of Freud's rewriting of history, another to understand its motives. Why on earth did the founder of psychoanalysis feel the need to tell all these fibs? Was it sheer boastfulness? A childish desire to establish his originality and intellectual priority? A shrewd marketing strategy? A way of promoting a personality cult within the movement he had created? In a book published in Dutch in 1993 and now translated into German as Der Fall Freud (it could be translated into English as The Freud Case: The Birth of Psychoanalysis out of Lying), the historian Han Israëls proposes an explanation that has at least the merit of simplicity. Freud, Israëls claims, was so confident in his first theories that he publicly boasted of therapeutic successes that he had not yet obtained. When they did not materialise, forcing him to revise his theories, Freud had to explain why he had abandoned them without being able to give the real reason: that would have entailed admitting that he had committed serious scientific fraud. Just like a child who has been caught in the act, he resorted to further lies, accusing the others of having lied to him. It was all the fault of that Victorian, Breuer, who had concealed from him Anna O.'s 'transference love' and its disastrous outcome. Or again, it was the fault of his female patients, who had told him all this nonsense about their daddies. By blaming it on convenient fall guys, Freud even allowed himself the luxury of changing his failures into victories. After all, was it not he who had managed to unearth the secret reason for all the lies he had been told? The myth of the hero was launched." -- Jeffry P. Ricker, Ph.D. Office Phone: (480) 423-6213 9000 E. Chaparral Rd. FAX Number: (480) 423-6298 Psychology Department [EMAIL PROTECTED] Scottsdale Community College Scottsdale, AZ 85256-2626 "The truth is rare and never simple." Oscar Wilde "Science must begin with myths and with the criticism of myths" Karl Popper Listowner: Psychologists Educating Students to Think Skeptically (PESTS)
