Customer Reviews

Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind

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

 

 

Kramer's lucid writing style is refreshing.This small volume will give the reader a critical review of Freud's major writings. Highlights of Freud's biography add spice to the narrative. Kramer uses our contemporary knowledge in psychiatry to rediagnose some of Freud's patients.I got a deeper understanding of some of the famous cases like Anna O,Dora, the Wolf Man the Rat Man. Like many, Kramer agrees that Freuds impact on the development of the field of psychotherapy and psychological thinking have been hugh. Freud was not perfect.This book help highlight the imperfections. More than that,it helps clarify in a short space, work that took Freud years and years to develop and 23 volumes of the Standard edition to Express.Like Freud,Kramer is a very talented writer as this and his other four volumes show.

This is an excellent, objective, and readable evaluation of the work and legacy of Sigmund Freud. Those who put this in the "Freud bashing" category appear not to desire an objective evaluation of Freud as a clinician nor as a scientist: Kramer presents the reader with such in a lively and precise way. He also presents the impact that Freud's ideas had on Western culture, and it is here where the impact of Freud is beyond question. Whether this impact has been for ill or good is open to question, speaking generally or more specifically in psychiatric and psychological science.

Fluent, timely, and clear-eyed, this reassessment of Freud's life is highly recommended. With his trademark learning and elegance, Kramer dissects Freud's legacy. An up-to-date assessment of the master's contribution.

The author is seemingly more interested in promoting himself rather than bother about the facts. When I contacted the author on his long abandoned web site pointing a factual error about Freud's family I got no reply or acknowledgement. On page 19 the book asserts that Emmanuel and Phillip (Freud's half brothers) occasionally helped financially their stepfather. But they did not have a stepfather. Sig's father, Jacob, was also their father rather than a stepfather.

The "Eminent Lives" series has some great writing and equally good research into some of the most significant people to walk the Earth (with the exception of Armstrong's book on Mohammed).
Kramer does a good job of taking Freud off the pedestal that many have used to create an altar for an atheist. But by showing Freud to be a mere human, he goes out of his way to point out his opinion that Freud, with all his faults, was "The Inventor of the Modern Mind."

While I don't personally agree with Kramer's evaluation of Freud any more than I did with a lot of his opinions in his "Listening to Prozac" book, this is a book worth reading to get a far better balanced view of a man who was responsible for much of our modern day vocabulary in dealing with our fellow humans.

Freud had a lot of dumb ideas, was a shameless self-promoter, ignored his own research, invented and lied about the complex nature of some of his patients, but at the end of the day, as Kramer points out, was one of the humans to leave the Earth with a net plus on his life ledger. Unfortunately some of his patients paid the price of his opinions with their lives in ruins, but it will be up to your own value system to determine whether this was worth it. After all, many Clinton supporters agree with his view that the lives of a million Tutsi were not worth the life of a single American as he allowed the most intense genocide in the history of mankind in the modern era to occur on his watch. His approval ratings must make him "right."

If you don't want to buy this book and see it in a bookstore, just take five minutes to read the last chapter to see that Kramer holds Freud in high regard using this measuring stick.

This is not a "five-star" book, but i gave it that rating to balance the superficial reviews by Freud groupies who read this book with blinders on, if they read it at all.

No, he wasn't. But he was much more an imaginative investigator, something of a literary and romantic writer more than a scientist, not at all what people imagine. Like Marx before him, many of his theories can be refuted but his influence and insight remain valuable. Marx and Freud will remain important critics of traditional society and of the bourgeois order which poorly replaced it. The truths they taught were less literally true than insightfully stimlulating for all time.

Peter Kramer is at once an admirer and a critic of Freud who has, however, a perfect right to be both, but he fails to write a really persuasive apercu of Freud. Kramer knows his Freud and his psychology but he is not firm in historical knowledge. The book does not impress.

Kramer purports to be an admirer of Freud, but this is a wholesale dismissal of his work, citing a number of misdiagnosed cases in Freud's later years. Writing in the name of clinical science, Kramer tells us that Freud is in need of radical re-evalutation, since he was unscientific in his approach to human behavior. This is the worst kind of reductionism, ignoring Freud's enormous contribution to the humanities. Modern literary criticism (e.g. the new critics) and poetry, not to mention sociology and anthropology, would be impossible today had not Freud written "The Interpretation of Dreams." Freud is to modern literary and social analysis what Darwin is to biological science. Poets like William Blake and Yeats would be incomprehensible without the analytic techniques and tools provided by Freud, and the great thinker and media analyst, Marshall McLuhan, to name but one distinguished disciple among many, was Freudian through and through.

Freud bashing has become almost as respectable as Bush bashing, and just as uninteresting. A review of this book in the N.Y. Sun by another Freud-basher, Ronald Dworkin, attacks Freud for his lack of "scientific rigor," trying to name things (psychical structures) that, according to Dworkin, simply don't exist. The problem is, for Freud, they do exist, at least so far as any mental states exist. The scientific rigor of psychoanalysis comes from Freud's explanations of human behavior, the sole conduit to the positing of any mental states at all. At any rate, such explanations, when they are presented in the better case studies, are compelling stories of human beings, and we often recognize them as such. It is admittedly fun to read about Freud's foibles and idiosyncracies, his friendship with Fleiss, his cocaine use, his skirmishes with the Gestapo, etc., but they are much more nicely summed up in the work of Peter Swales, if one can find it, and Peter Gay's magnificent biography, Freud: A Life for Our Time. Books such as the present one are simply irrelevant.