Customer Reviews

Freud Evaluated - The Completed Arc

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

An astonishingly rich and documented critics of Freud's theory and sources, this book reviews the evolution of the early psychoanalysis and attempts to describe where and how Freud went wrong. Starting from Charcot's neurology and psychiatry, developed during the second half of XIX century, the medical theories about neurosis are examined in relation to their impact on Freud's early formulations. I had not realized, before reading this book how deep was Charcot's influence on young Freud and to what extent Freud tried to develop the theories of his master in order to increase their explanatory power. Unfortunately, the far Freud went on in his theory, and the more it became comprehensive, the less it was "scientific" and could be directly compared with empyrical evidence. In his fifties Freud had developed a powerful therapeutic instrument, whose scientific foundations were however unproven and most probably impossible to test; any further theoretical improvement went farther and farther away from contemporary medical science. Macmillan reconstructs the history of a marvelous failure and explains why the status of modern psychoanalysis is so uncertain. This book is exceedingly critical against the so called "ermeneutic" interpretation of psychoanalysis, that suggests psychoanalysis to be similar to the art of interpreting books and stories, but it is nevertheless a must for anyone interested in psychology.

If I had to review Malcolm Macmillan's Freud Evaluated in a single sentence, it would be, "This book tries to do too much for one book." Macmillan attempts to discredit Freud's theories. This he cannot do, not (of course) because Freud was always right, but because the task of discrediting Freud comprehensively and thoroughly is simply too much for one book, even a very, very big book like this one (it has 762 pages, no less). Freud wrote and thought far too much, and his ideas are far too complicated, for this to be a sensible or manageable task.

Freud Evaluated is nevertheless essential reading for anyone interested in Freud or psychoanalysis. Macmillan's criticisms of Freud are to a large extent derivative of the enormous body of critical literature on psychoanalysis that has been accumulating for decades, but he works his way through that material so thoroughly that anyone who wants to see what criticisms have been made of Freud will have to read him. Macmillan's sources include numerous analytic writers (despite their reputation as slavish followers of their master, post-Freudian psychoanalysts were often highly critical of many of Freud's original theories). One of Macmillan's key sources in his critique of Freud's theory of infantile sexuality is Irving Bieber, a once extremely influential but now vilified figure better known for his theories about homosexuality (which Macmillan doesn't discuss).

The quality of Macmillan's arguments (when he makes real arguments at all instead of simply citing existing literature critical of Freud, in effect assuming that the fact that someone criticized Freud by itself proves that Freud must have been mistaken) is extremely variable. If he makes a good case against parts of Freud's theories (the death instinct, let's say, or Freud's dream theory) he makes a pretty poor case against others. His section on infantile sexuality is a real mess, confused, self-contradictory (it seems to move back and forth between saying that perversions are genuinely sexual and saying that they aren't, without the inconsistency being noted, much less resolved) and perhaps the low point of this book. It isn't worth discussing precisely where Macmillan's goes wrong in a short review, and I'm not sure it would be worth discussing in an extended review either, since the murky, contorted nature of his argument is such as to make further analysis seem a waste of time.

I believe that the uneven quality of Macmillan's arguments, which are far less rigorous than their dry and often extremely technical nature would suggest and hardly represent the last word on Freud, is partly due to the overly-ambitious nature of his project. Had he written something more narrowly focused and limited in its ambitions, Macmillan would have had time to think the issues through more carefully and produced a better book; as it was, attempting the monumental task of evaluating the whole of Freud's work, he inevitably makes a mess of some things and thereby limits his overall achievement, not that this is apparent to him (he has the loftiest, most Olympian estimation of his own work, and is all too eager to share it with us). I will grant Macmillan that in comparison to Richard Webster's Why Freud Was Wrong or any of numerous other, popularized attempts to discredit Freud, his Freud Evaluated is like the Critique of Pure Reason - but it reaches that level only when compared to such junk. I've given it three stars largely because of its unrelentingly negative and one-sided nature.

Counter-arguments against many of Macmillian's criticisms of Freud certainly exist, but you won't read much about them in Freud Evaluated. Among the literature Macmillan ignores is Christopher Badcock's Oedipus in Evolution, which presents a case against the idea that the Oedipus complex is an evolutionary impossibility, something Macmillan thinks beyond question (here, as too often in this book, he is simply citing other people's work - Martin Daly and Margo Wilson's, in this case - and echoing its conclusions). If you're looking for the best purely negative critique of Freud in the scholarly literature, Freud Evaluated may be it. If you want a balanced or sensible assessment, look some place else.