cover image Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend

Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend

. Viking Books, $24.95 (301pp) ISBN 978-0-670-87221-3

Here are 20 rigorous essays that mount a formidable critique of mainstream Freudian theory and practice, and of Freud's major cases. Whereas Freud fostered the idea of solitary, heroic discovery through his self-analysis, in reality, the authors contend, he taught his followers to replace the empirical attitude with blind loyalty and censorship, instilling in them a negative, quasi-paranoid view of rival theorists and clinicians. The contributors--among them Frank J. Sulloway, Ernest Gellner, Peter J. Swales and other noted American and European scholars in fields ranging from philosophy to neuroscience--present compelling evidence that Freud habitually and greatly exaggerated his therapeutic successes. They also cast serious doubt on new Freudians' confidence in free association as a curative tool to decipher the meaning of dreams or to reconstruct events from a patient's distant past. Freud's attempt to fit women (whom he apparently viewed as second-class humans) into his ""castration-based"" account of the mind is seen as having disastrous consequences, such as assumptions of ""normal"" female masochism or women's moral and cultural weakness. Although the book as a whole overstates its case, Crews, eminent literary critic, satirist and professor emeritus at U.C.-Berkeley, has done such an excellent job of choosing and editing the selections--all of which have been previously published, mainly in academic books and periodicals--that they form a cohesive whole, and as such put psychoanalysis squarely on the defensive. Agent, Frederick Crews. (Aug.)