I stand corrected; I think the math part resonated because my oldest son was a college math major; the physics got lost in the memory void. What would Freud think of that? ;-)
Annette Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph. D. Professor, Psychological Sciences University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110 tay...@sandiego.edu ________________________________________ From: Allen Esterson [allenester...@compuserve.com] Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 2010 3:54 AM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: Re:[tips] Freud and intellectuals Annette Taylor wrote: >Our good friend Allen is indeed a non-psychologist >scholar! Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure >Allen is a mathematician by training and trade. Correction! I have a degree in physics from University College London, 1958 vintage. I have to acknowledge that I only obtained a Second Class Honours Degree http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_undergraduate_degree_classification – but that sufficed for me to know immediately that the widely circulating claim that Einstein's first wife did the (quite elementary) mathematics for his celebrated 1905 Special Relativity paper was nonsense: http://www.esterson.org/Who_Did_Einsteins_Mathematics.htm I plied my trade teaching pre-University level mathematics and physics in Colleges of Further Education in London for some 35 years. So how (as I'm sure some TIPSters are dying to know :-) -- others may switch off here!) did I end up doing research on Freud? Sometime in the early 1980s a cousin (Jungian by inclination) made laudatory comments about Freud and suggested I should read his work. By good fortune, the only relevant book on the shelves of my local library contained the Wolf Man case history. I have to say that as I read Freud's analytic explanations the thought that went repeatedly through my mind was "How can anyone take this stuff seriously?" (See below for a glorious sample.) I also came to the conclusion that a key individual (a servant girl "Grusha") from the patient's infancy who hazily emerged in a supposed recovered memory after more than four years of analysis, conveniently supplying what Freud called "the solution", was an invention. (As I was to discover, the Wolf Man told an interviewer many years later: "I cannot even remember this Grusha.") This led to further reading of works by, and about, Freud (Ellenberger, Sulloway). Following up Elizabeth Thornton's sceptical account of the seduction theory episode in *Freud and Cocaine* (1983), I checked out the original papers, and all Freud's later accounts of the episode. This led me to the conclusion that the whole thing (from the original papers to the final traditional story) was phoney. (Unbeknown to me, Frank Cioffi had already arrived at the same conclusion – see "Was Freud a Liar?" (1974) in *Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience*.) By that stage I thought "I've got a book on my hands", and set about a close reading of other case histories and of more of Freud's writings, especially his general accounts of psychoanalysis. Getting published is another story… Excerpt from the Wolf Man case history: The following passage is part of Freud's explanation for his patient's habitual constipation (and the administration of regular enemas by a servant) in terms of symbolic rebirth. (Incidentally, we know from the interview with the Wolf Man much later that the constipation was caused by a country doctor in Russia giving him inappropriate medicine that permanently damaged his intestinal mucous membranes. The Wolf Man said that during his 4+ year analysis: "I somehow managed to come by itself, a few times. And Freud wrote [in the case history] 'We've been successful!' No such thing!"): "The stool was the child, as which he was born a second time, to a happier life… The necessary condition of his re-birth was that he should have an enema administered to him by a man… This can only have meant that he had identified himself with his mother, that the man was acting as his father, and that the enema was repeating the act of copulation, as the fruit of which the excrement-baby (which was once again himself) would be born. The phantasy of re-birth was therefore bound up closely with the necessary condition of sexual satisfaction from a man. So the translation now runs to this effect: only on condition that he took the woman's place and substituted himself for his mother, and thus let himself be sexually satisfied by his father and bore him a child – only on that condition would his illness leave him. Here, therefore, the phantasy of re-birth was simply a mutilated and censored version of the homosexual wishful phantasy." (Freud, 1918, SE. 17, p. 100) Never was it more justly said "You couldn't make it up!" Reference in relation to the Wolf Man case history: Stanley Fish: "The Primal Scene of Persuasion", in *Unauthorized Freud*, ed. F. Crews (1998), pp. 186-199. Fish observes in relation to Freud's extraordinary gift for persuasive writing: "Although Freud will repeatedly urge us… to take our 'independent share' in the work, that independence has long been taken from us. The judgement he will soon solicit is a judgement he already controls." Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London allenester...@compuserve.com http://www.esterson.org --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: tay...@sandiego.edu. 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