Customer Reviews

Freud and Man's Soul

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In Freud and Man's Soul, Bettleheim discusses example after example of mistranslations of Freud's most important concepts, mistranslations that have served to cast psychoanalysis as an objective, exlusively clinical and quantitative science. Instead, Bettleheim argues with examples that Freud was profoundly motivated by his humanism, and strongly and explicitly opposed to a merely behavioral science of psychoanalysis. He argues that in fact the persistent and profound mistranslations of Freud by his American translators can be traced in part to the unconscious desire to avoid taking any of this profound science of the soul to heart. Bettleheim thus has saved Freud's legacy from the trash can of sterile behavioral theories of clinically-minded American psychoanalysis. Among Bettleheim's more helpful discussions is in his objection to the "Ego-Id-Superego" trinity, as it is translated into English. The use of the Latin forms is not only unnecessary, as Freud was using common German pronouns, but an obstacle to understanding what Freud meant most to convey: these are parts of us, of me, and not just abstract concepts describing others. Bettleheim offers the alternative "Me-It-Over(or Upper)Me" as consistent with Freud's intent, which was in part to involve our souls, our affections, in understanding ourselves. Reading Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams suggested to me that there was much more to Freud's thought than popular culture suggests; Bettleheim has made some sense of the pervasive distortion, and how we might undermine it. Now if only someone will re-translate everything Freud wrote...

I have read many of Freud's works for years and only recently believed that I gained significant understanding. This came initially from reading Richard Wollheim's book _Sigmund Freud_. Then with both new perspective and renewed interest, I checked this book out from the library.

The first thing one notices when reading it is how articulately it is written, and the ease of understanding by which Bettelheim's prose is understood. The clarity and simplicity is wonderful and adds further support for, and credibility to, his claims.

There is no question of his passion to express his explicit concerns regarding the mistranslation of Freud's corpus. However, further benefit are his explanations of the various myths Freud drew on, how Freud constructed his vocabulary, and how Freud was motivated by love and concern for others in an eternal sense.

This is wonderful book that anyone with even the slightest interest in Freud would do well in reading. I wish I had read it first. However, now it is a valuable resource as Bettelheim's understanding of Freud is so thorough, elegant, poignant, and full of respect for this great man and thinker.

The review by D. Smitherman is dead accurate. I would add only that Bettelheim touches on how American physicians and clinicians "inserted" (to use Bettleheim's term) notions of psychoanalysis to be used as a tool for social conformity. Freud thought American culture sick and narcissistic, and didn't believe that social conformity or adaptation was an appropriate use of psychoanalysis. He also didn't believe in any requirement that professionals should be sole practitioners of psychoanalysis. In fact, he wished for an army of trained lay-people to do this work of the soul. As a consumer/survivor, that was all a revelation to me, and redemptive of Freud.

This book might have been subtitled, "Retranslating Freud," because that's just what the author does with some of Freud's key terms.

I was gratified to see that "cathexis" could actually be rendered "charge" or "investment": much more consistent with how Freud uses the term. Freud was certainly a reductionist, but mistranslations of his work make him seem absolutely bloodless.

This is one of the best books on Freud I've ever read.

The main theme of this book is that the ideas of Sigmund Freud have been widely misunderstood. To justify these assertions, Bettelheim lists many errors in the translation of Freud's works from German to English. German pronouns are not nearly as simple to use as the English "equivalents" and Freud's intention when using them is quite different from what his translators concluded. Since the individual's thoughts concerning themselves are so critical to Freudian thought, the difference is nontrivial.
Bettelheim cites many other errors in translation, in general where the English word denotes a much stronger interpretation than Freud intended. This is puzzling, as in some cases, the translator did not use the direct English equivalent. Bettelheim also deals in depth with the story of Oedipus, as the Oedipus complex is such an important feature of "popular" Freudian thought. The real story of Oedipus is not one about the love of one's mother, but about attempted infanticide, mistaken identity, the misinterpretation of predictions and great remorse over deadly deeds. Bettelheim argues, with a great deal of justification that Freud was not speaking about a desire to love one's mother when he describes the story.
In only a few pages, Bettelheim successfully argues that Freud is deeply misunderstood, largely due to poor translations and misunderstandings. His arguments are convincing, so if you really want to understand Freud, this is a book you must read.

Bettelheim, despite some of his other problems(with autism for example), writes exquisitely on Freud. He refines the translations of Freud's work so eloquently that I actually understand it!

Everything the other reviewers said PLUS... the Oedipus Complex for example, is not an obscure every boy wants to delete his father thing. Read the book and see... it has more to do with the day a son surpasses his father, and what that does to the triad of Dad, Mom, son.

The American psychiatric community perverted Freud. I cannot believe the watered down, mistranslated, haha way I was taught "Freudian psychology".

Bettelheim reinterprets Freud through better translation AND correlation to his time and place in history. This book left me agahst. I have never encountered such a profound redirection of a tenent so basic to my understanding of anything.
Barbara

This simple and lucid little book holds a very important key to the proper understanding and true appreciation of Freud the Humanist and the spiritual dimension of his work, and indeed of all psychology. It stands as an all-time classic, in my estimation.

In this short book, Bettleheim another giant of a theorist who also was close to the master himself, takes center stage to join the line of Freud acolytes (Yung, Adler, Brown, Fromm, Becker, among many others) who for the last several decades have been reinterpreting him. The difference is that in this book as a part of his reinterpretation, Bettleheim claims that the Psychologists on the other side of the ocean, meaning America, have purposefully gotten Freud all wrong? Early on in the book (and at first) it seemed like it was merely a question of what was being "lost in translation." However, as the book progressed, the claims against "the Americans" (as well as against their lazier counterparts in Europe), continued to grow until they became a great deal more serious; serious to the point they became down right startling. By the end of the book the charge was that American psychologists and psychoanalysts had "on purpose" fundamentally gotten Freud wrong altogether.

The author's claim rests on a charge that is so brutally fundamental that it is embarrassing. It is that the very act of using and teaching Freud in America is itself a profoundly (Freudian) culturally "defensive act." Freud, in the hands of American psychotherapists, somehow has been turned into a convenient Procrustian Behavorialist bed, in which the soul, among many other essential Freudian concepts, is simply chopped-off and "read out" of Freudian theory and practice altogether -- presumably (and primarily) to meet the requirements of America's mindless paradigm of behavioralism? But in fact their are even deeper and darker reasons.

Together these are the most serious of all possible charges.

And while one might quibble with the author's own exclusive claims to Freudian knowledge, he writes so cleanly and lucidly that the reader has no choice but to first give him the benefit of the doubt. The author writes with such single-minded clarity of thought, that every sentence, every paragraph is just short of a work of art. Thus, as a Ph.D. trained in the very behaviorist mode he is criticizing, I was inclined to stand at attention and listen to what he had to say.

And what he had to say is simply this: Freudian psychoanalysis is about introspection. It is not about "what is wrong with the other guy" -- even when it is being used as a tool of therapy. Freud and many others who followed him understood this instinctively and always continued their own introspection as an integral part of their own self-enrichment as well as constantly further developing their own techniques of therapy. To them this was the only way. The therapy's job was never to observe the extent of the craziness of his subjects, but to encounter them on their own terms (and within their own spaces) with tools the subject himself could adopt and use in his own intervention; and then be able on his own to bring the needed awareness at the point of contact with his problem, thus teaching him successful self-engagement at every level of the therapy. On the other side of the Atlantic, the goal of therapy was always to teach the patient how to replace the therapist and become his own therapist.

But according to the author, what American psychology has evolved into is little more than a set of Kamakazi attacks by the therapist "from on high" upon his patients? Using his superior knowledge, position, status and transference to maintain an upper hand on the "human germs being observed in the Petrie dish." In the hands of these "psychological Nazi-like witch doctors," psychoanalysis becomes a cruel "string-along" game of "stump the chump." And that is not yet the bad part.

The bad part is why they do this. It is for, among other reasons, to bring Freud's interpretation within the scope of if not within complete social alignment with America's own parochial fears, paranoia and defensiveness against mostly sexual and racial ideas extant within the American culture. For to let loose with the "real ideas" that Freud intended, and that the author also claims somehow got lost in translation, would be to fundamentally change the way America see itself.

Why should we be surprised that America has bastardized Freud? It has bastardized everything else. Five stars

Over the past 100 years, the physical and biological sciences have revolutionized our world, and have enabled man to understand and control nature. During the same period of time, progress in the social sciences has been painfully slow; it has consisted of an ongoing process of criticism and interpretation that has failed to produce any testable claims.

In Freud and Man's Soul, Bettleheim argues that poor translations of Freud's work have caused psychoanalysis to be widely misunderstood in the English-speaking world, and that psychoanalysis has been unfairly dismissed by inappropriate comparison with the hard sciences. The sad reality that Bettleheim appears reluctant to admit is that progress in psychoanalysis has been terribly unsatisfactory compared to other branches of medicine. The latter have succeeded in wiping out diseases and making life better for those who have access to care.

In reading this book, I am reminded of the words of the great physicist Richard Feynman, who said, "Psychoanalysis is not a science." Bettleheim's efforts to define psychoanalysis as a "science of the soul" as distinct from a natural science is a desperate plea to accord respectability to what we should recognize as a voodoo practice that is rapidly headed for extinction.

In light of these considerations, what does the future hold for pyschiatry? Modern scientific work in the areas of genetics and brain imaging may offer a ray of hope. As for pyschoanalysis, it will continue to be of historical and literary interest, but offers no hope as a therapeutic practice in today's world.