Freud's Answer: The Social Origins of Our Psychoanalytic Century [Hardcover]

Martin Wain (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1998 | ISBN-10: 1566632161 | ISBN-13: 978-1566632164

In this stimulating and original book, Martin Wank provides the first coherent view of the roots of Freudian psychoanalysis, showing how Freud and his colleagues were social, political, and economic therapists in the broadest sense.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If, as is increasingly clear, Freudian psychoanalysis is neither scientifically respectable nor therapeutically efficacious, what exactly was Freud up to? Martin Wain's reply, in Freud's Answer, is that psychoanalysis is essentially a defense of modern liberal democracy in disguise, "a symbolical, deflective tale about the mysterious workings of the mind (which was really the quite puzzling and often irrational social order), told with a seeming reason and logic that many found believable." In its topics, its methods, and its goals, psychoanalysis was designed--in part adventitiously, in part deliberately--to suppress, divert attention from, or assuage the effects of the tensions intrinsic to modernity. Although Wain's purpose is not to attack psychoanalysis, he nevertheless expresses his views that it is sophistic and that its practitioners are guilty of deceit. While he concedes that the deception was perhaps necessary for the survival of modern liberal democracy, his views are sure to be unwelcome to committed Freudian believers.

The thesis of Freud's Answer is thus similar to those found in Ernest Gellner's The Psychoanalytic Movement, William J. McGrath's Freud's Discovery of Psychoanalysis, and Carl E. Schorske's Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Wain's canvas is larger, however, so he paints with broader strokes--for example, in the first two chapters, he briskly sketches the social history of Europe from the fall of Rome to 1850. The pace slows as he approaches the task of deciphering the hidden agenda of psychoanalysis, but his writing remains lively. Freud's Answer is certain to provoke controversy; it is equally certain that it will have to be reckoned with. --Glenn Branch

From Library Journal

Despite mixed therapeutic results at best, psychoanalysis has been highly influential in shaping the modern sensibility. Wain argues that this is true because Freudian thought arose as a response to a crisis of 19th-century thought and served to contain that crisis by offering new certainties to replace the old ones lost in the French and Industrial revolutions. While the idea of therapy as social control has been delineated more forcefully and originally by Michel Foucault and Thomas Szasz, among others, this title does offer new ideas on the reasons Freudian thought was attractive to the intellectual elite of the early 20th century. For academic collections in intellectual and social history.?Mary Ann Hughes, Neill P.L., Pullman, WA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Ivan R Dee (October 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566632161
• ISBN-13: 978-1566632164
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,970,278 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Sophistry, August 13, 2004

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James Hissom "jameshissom" (Charleston, WV United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Freud's Answer: The Social Origins of Our Psychoanalytic Century (Hardcover)

While this is a fairly nice, and certainly readable book on the liberal-democratic historical context of psychoanalysis, Wain simply goes off the social-constructive deep end in insisting that Freud be read more as a representative than a shaper of the modern sensibility. His argument has been presented before, with greater vigor by Foucault and Co., but the sophistry is the same: psychoanalysis is a medium of social control, conferring an internalized control structure in place of an external, analysis is not exact, medical science (what happened to cultural science?), so it's necessarily a screen for social interests, and, anyway, science isn't that hot to begin with. Foucault finally pops up on the last page to confer his blessing on the whole knowledge/power argument. Readers would do well to consult some older, better books like Russell Jacoby's Social Amnesia, Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism (strong defenses of the socially revolutionary implications of analysis) and Susan Vaughn's The Talking Cure (a neuro-linguistic vindication of same).